DAUGHTERSOF THE PURITANS

A Group of Brief Biographies

BY

SETH CURTIS BEACH

_Essay Index Reprint Series_

BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS, INC. FREEPORT, NEW YORK

First published 1905Reprinted 1967

[Illustration: THE HOME OF LYDIA MARIA CHILD AT WAYLAND, MASSACHUSETTS]

CONTENTS

 PAGE

 CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK, 1789-1867 1

 MARY LOVELL WARE, 1798-1849 43

 LYDIA MARIA CHILD, 1802-1880 79

 DOROTHEA LYNDE DIX, 1802-1887 123

 SARAH MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI, 1810-1850 165

 HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, 1811-1896 209

 LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, 1832-1888 251

I

CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK

[Illustration: CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK]

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Miss Sedgwick woulddoubtless have been considered the queen of American letters, but, inthe opinion of her friends, the beauty of her character surpassed themerit of her books. In 1871, Miss Mary E. Dewey, her life-longneighbor, edited a volume of Miss Sedgwick's letters, mostly tomembers of her family, in compliance with the desire of those who knewand loved her, "that some printed memorial should exist of a life sobeautiful and delightful in itself, and so beneficent in its influenceupon others. " Truly a "life beautiful in itself and beneficent in itsinfluence, " the reader will say, as he lays down this tender volume. 

Catharine Maria Sedgwick was born at Stockbridge, Mass. , in 1789, thefirst year of the presidency of George Washington. She was adescendant from Robert Sedgwick, major-general under Cromwell, andgovernor of Jamaica. Her father, Theodore Sedgwick, was a country boy, born in 1746, upon a barren farm in one of the hill-towns ofConnecticut. Here the family opened a country store, then added atavern, and with the combined industries of farm, store and tavern, Theodore, most fortunate of the sons if not the favorite, was sent toYale college, where he remained, until, in the last year of hiscourse, he managed to get himself expelled. He began the study oftheology, his daughter suggests, in a moment of contrition overexpulsion from college, but soon turned to the law for which he hadsingular aptitude. He could not have gone far in his legal careerwhen, before the age of twenty-one, he married a beautiful girl whosememory he always tenderly cherished, as well he might considering hispart in the tragedy of her early death. He had taken small pox, hadbeen duly quarantined and discharged but his young wife combed out thetangles of his matted hair, caught the disease, and died, within ayear after marriage. 

Marriage was necessary in those days, his daughter suggests, and theyear of conventional widowhood having expired, Mr. Sedgwick, then atthe age of twenty-three, married Miss Pamela Dwight, the mother of hisfour sons, all successful lawyers, and his three daughters, allexemplary women. The second Mrs. Sedgwick was presumably morebeautiful than the first; certainly she was more celebrated. She isimmortalized by her portrait in Griswold's "American Court, " and by afew complimentary lines in Mrs. Ellet's "Queens of American Society. "

Theodore Sedgwick rose to distinction by his energies and talents but, as we have seen, he was of sufficiently humble origin, which could nothave been greatly redeemed by expulsion from college; while at the ageof twenty-three, that must have been his chief exploit. Social lineswere very firmly drawn in that old colonial society, before the ploughof the Revolution went through it, and there was no more aristocraticfamily than the Dwights, in Western Massachusetts. 

Madame Quincy gives an account of a visit, in her girlhood, paid tothe mother of Miss Pamela, Madame Dwight, in her "mansion-house, " andsays that her husband, Brig. -Gen. Joseph Dwight, was "one of theleading men of Massachusetts in his day. " Madame Dwight was presumablynot inferior to her husband. She was daughter of Col. Williams, ofWilliamstown, who commanded a brigade in the old French War, and whoseson founded Williams College. A daughter of Madame Dwight, older thanPamela, married Mark Hopkins, "a distinguished lawyer of his time, "says Madame Quincy, and grandfather of Rev. Mark Hopkins, D. D. , perhaps the most illustrious president of the college founded byMadame Dwight's family. 

The intermarriage of the Williamses, Dwights, and Hopkinses formed afine, aristocratic circle, into which the Sedgwicks were not verycordially welcomed. "My mother's family (of this, " says Mrs. Sedgwick, "I have rather an indefinite impression than any knowledge) objectedto my father on the score of family, they priding themselves on theirgentle blood; but as he afterwards rose far beyond their highestwater-mark, the objection was cast into oblivion by those who madeit. "

A few years after this marriage, the war of the Revolution began. Mr. Sedgwick entered the army, served as an officer under Washington, whose acquaintance and favor he enjoyed, and from that time, for fortyyears until his death, he was in public life, in positions ofresponsibility and honor. He was member of the Continental Congress, member of the House of Representatives, Speaker of the House, Senatorfrom Massachusetts, and, at his death, judge of the MassachusettsSupreme Court. 

Judge Sedgwick was a staunch Federalist and, in spite of the fact thathe himself was not born in the purple, he shared the common Federalistcontempt for the masses. "I remember my father, " says Miss Sedgwick, "one of the kindest-hearted men and most observant of the rights ofall beneath him, habitually spoke of the people as 'Jacobins, ''sans-culottes, ' and 'miscreants. ' He--and this I speak as a type ofthe Federalist party--dreaded every upward step they made, regardingtheir elevation as a depression, in proportion to their ascension, ofthe intelligence and virtue of the country. " "He was born too soon, "says his daughter apologetically, "to relish the freedoms ofdemocracy, and I have seen his brow lower when a free and easymechanic came to the front door, and upon one occasion, I remember histurning off the east steps (I am sure not kicking, but thedemonstration was unequivocal) a grown up lad who kept his hat onafter being told to remove it. " In these days one would hardly tellhim to remove it, let alone hustling him off the steps. 

The incident shows how far education, prosperity, wealth, and fortyyears of public life had transformed the father of Miss Sedgwick fromthe country boy of a hill-farm in Connecticut. More to our presentpurpose, the apologetic way in which Miss Sedgwick speaks of thesehigh-bred prejudices of her father, shows that she does not sharethem. "The Federalists, " she says, "stood upright, and their feetfirmly planted on the rock of aristocracy but that rock was bedded inthe sands, or rather was a boulder from the Old World, and the tide ofdemocracy was surely and swiftly undermining it. "

When this was written, Miss Sedgwick had made the discovery that, while the Federalists had the better "education, intellectual andmoral, " the "democrats had among them much native sagacity" and anearnest "determination to work out the theories of the government. "She is writing to her niece: "All this my dear Alice, as you maysuppose, is an after-thought. Then I entered fully, and with the faithand ignorance of childhood, into the prejudices of the time. " Thoseprejudices must have been far behind her when her first story waswritten, "A New England Tale, " in which it happens, inadvertently wemay believe, all the worst knaves are blue-blooded and at least mostof the decent persons are poor and humble. Later we shall see herslumming in New York like a Sister of Charity, 'saving those that arelost, ' a field of labor toward which her Federalist education scarcelyled. 

She could have learned some condescension and humanity from her motherwho, in spite of her fine birth, seems to have been modest andretiring to a degree. She was very reluctant to have her husbandembark upon a public career; had, her daughter says, "No sympathy withwhat is called honor and distinction"; and wrote her husband a letterof protest which is worth quoting if only to show how a well-trainedwife would write her doting husband something more than a century ago:"Pardon me, my dearest Mr. Sedgwick, if I beg you once more to thinkover the matter before you embark in public business. I grant that the'call of our country, ' the 'voice of fame, ' and the 'Honorable' and'Right-Honorable, ' are high sounding words. 'They play around thehead, but they come not near the heart. '" However, if he decides for apublic career, she will submit: "Submission is my duty, and howeverhard, I will try to practice what reason teaches me I am underobligation to do. " That address, "my dearest Mr. Sedgwick, " from awife a dozen years after marriage, shows a becoming degree of respect. 

We may be sure that this gentle mother would have encouraged no sillynotions of social distinctions in the minds of her children. Even Mr. Sedgwick seems to have had a softer and more human side to his naturethan we have yet seen. Miss Sedgwick enjoys repeating a story whichshe heard from a then "venerable missionary. " The son of the villageshoemaker, his first upward step was as boy-of-all-work of the clerkof courts. He had driven his master to the court session in dignifiedsilence, broken on arrival by a curt order to take in the trunk. "Ashe set it down in the entry, " says Miss Sedgwick, "my father, thenjudge of the Supreme Judicial Court, was coming down stairs, bringinghis trunk himself. He set it down, accosted the boy most kindly, andgave him his cordial hand. The lad's feelings, chilled by his master'shaughtiness, at once melted, and took an impression of my father'skindness that was never effaced. "

The individual is so much a creature of his environment, that I mustcarry these details a little farther. Forty years in public life, Judge Sedgwick had an extended acquaintance and, according to thecustom of the time, kept open house. "When I remember, " says MissSedgwick, "how often the great gate swung open for the entrance oftraveling vehicles, the old mansion seems to me much more like anhostelrie of the olden time than the quiet house it now is. Myfather's hospitality was unbounded. It extended from the gentleman inhis coach, chaise, or on horseback, according to his means ornecessities, to the poor, lame beggar that would sit half the nightroasting at the kitchen fire with the negro servants. My father was insome sort the chieftain of his family, and his home was their resortand resting-place. Uncles and aunts always found a welcome there;cousins wintered and summered with us. Thus hospitality was an elementin our education. It elicited our faculties of doing and suffering. Itsmothered the love and habit of minor comforts and petty physicalindulgences that belong to a higher state of civilization and generateselfishness, and it made regard for others, and small sacrifices forthem, a habit. "

Just one word more about this home, the like of which it would be hardto find in our generation: "No bickering or dissention was everpermitted. Love was the habit, the life of the household rather thanthe law. --A querulous tone, a complaint, a slight word of dissention, was met by that awful frown of my father's. Jove's thunder was to apagan believer but as a summer day's drifting cloud to it. It was notso dreadful because it portended punishment, --it was punishment; itwas a token of suspension of the approbation and love that were ourlife. "

These passages have a twofold value. They tell us in what school MissSedgwick was educated, and they give us a specimen of her literarystyle. Language is to her a supple instrument, and she makes thereader see what she undertakes to relate. 

Judge Sedgwick died in Boston, in 1813, when Miss Sedgwick wastwenty-three. The biographical Dictionaries say he was a member of Dr. Channing's church. As Miss Sedgwick relates the facts, he had longdesired to "make a public profession of religion, " but had beendeterred because he could not conscientiously join the church of hisfamily, in Stockbridge, with its Calvinistic confession, and was tootender of the feelings of his pastor to join another, --"unworthymotives, " says Miss Sedgwick. Briefly stated, he now sent for Dr. Channing and received from him the communion. Later, Miss Sedgwickfollowed him into the Unitarian fellowship. She, and two distinguishedbrothers, were among the founders of the first Unitarian church in NewYork city. 

Miss Dewey calls her volume "The Life and Letters" of Miss Sedgwick, but the Life is very scantily written. She has given us a picturerather than a biography. Indeed, to write a biography of Miss Sedgwickis no easy task, there was so much of worth in her character and solittle of dramatic incident in her career. Independent in hercircumstances, exempt from struggle for existence or for socialposition, unambitious for literary fame and surprised at its coming, unmarried and yet domestic in tastes and habits, at home in any one ofthe five households of her married brothers and sisters, she lived forseventy-seven years as a favored guest at the table of fortune. Shesaw things happen to others, but they did not happen to her. It waswith her as with Whittier's sweet Quakeress:

 "For all her quiet life flowed on As meadow streamlets flow, Where fresher green reveals alone The noiseless ways they go. "

Of her outward career, Miss Dewey truly says: "No striking incidents, no remarkable occurrences will be found in it, but the gradualunfolding and ripening amid congenial surroundings of a true andbeautiful soul, a clear and refined intellect, and a singularlysympathetic social nature. She was born eighty years ago"--this waswritten in 1871, --"when the atmosphere was still electric with thestorm in which we took our place among the nations, and, passing herchildhood in the seclusion of a New England valley, while yet herfamily was linked to the great world without by ties both politicaland social, early and deep foundations were laid in her character ofpatriotism, religious feeling, love of nature, and strong attachmentto home, and to those who made it what it was. And when in later life, she took her place among the acknowledged leaders of literature andsociety, these remained the central features of her character, andaround them gathered all the graceful culture, the activephilanthropy, the social accomplishment, which made her presence a joywherever it came. "

It is not singular if she began her existence at a somewhat advancedstage. She was quite sure she remembered incidents that took placebefore she was two years old. She remembered a dinner party at whichMiss Susan Morton, afterward Madame Quincy, was present, and to whichher father and her brother, Theodore, came from Philadelphia. If youare anxious to know what incidents of such an event would fixthemselves in the mind of a child of two, they were these: She madeher first attempt to say "Theodore, " and "Philadelphia, " and she triedher baby trick of biting her glass, for which she had doubtless beenreproved, and watched its effect upon her father. "I recall perfectlythe feeling with which I turned my eye to him, expecting to see thatbrow cloud with displeasure, but it was smooth as love could make it. That consciousness, that glance, that assurance, remained stampedindelibly. "

"Education in the common sense, " says Miss Sedgwick, "I had next tonone. " For schools, she fared like other children in Stockbridge, withthe difference that her father was "absorbed in political life, " hermother, in Catharine's youth an invalid, died early, and no one, shesays, "dictated my studies or overlooked my progress. I rememberfeeling an intense ambition to be at the head of my class, andgenerally being there. Our minds were not weakened by too much study;reading, spelling, and Dwight's geography were the only paths ofknowledge into which we were led;" to which accomplishments she addsas an after-thought, grammar and arithmetic. 

Nevertheless, when in 1838, six of the Sedgwick family travelledtogether through France and Italy, doing much of those sunny lands onfoot, Miss Sedgwick was interpreter for the party in both countries, apparently easy mistress of their respective languages. It isremarkable what fine culture seems to have been attainable by a NewEngland child born more than a hundred years ago, when Harvard andYale were, as we are told, mere High Schools, and Radcliffe andWellesley were not even dreamed of. Instead of Radcliffe or Wellesley, Miss Sedgwick attended a boarding school in Albany, at the age ofthirteen and, at the age of fifteen, another in Boston, the latter forsix months, and the former could not have been more than two years. Both, according to her, gave her great social advantages, and didlittle for her scholarship. Miss Bell, the head of the Albany school, "rose late, was half the time out of the school, and did very littlewhen in it. "

Miss Paine's school in Boston, let us hope, was better; but "I was atthe most susceptible age. My father's numerous friends in Bostonopened their doors to me. I was attractive in my appearance"--she iswriting this to a niece and it is probably all true--"and, from alwaysassociating on equal terms with those much older than myself, I had amental maturity rather striking, and with an ignorance of the world, aromantic enthusiasm, an aptitude at admiring and loving thataltogether made me an object of general interest. I was admired andflattered. Harry and Robert were then resident graduates at Cambridge. They were too inexperienced to perceive the mistake I was making; theywere naturally pleased with the attentions I was receiving. The winterpassed away in a series of bewildering gayeties. I had talent enoughto be liked by my teachers, and good nature to secure their good will. I gave them very little trouble in any way. When I came home fromBoston I felt the deepest mortification at my waste of time and money, though my father never said one word to me on the subject. For theonly time in my life I rose early to read French, and in a few weekslearned more by myself than I had acquired all winter. "

It will be seen that she had the ability to study without a teacher, and that is an art which, with time at one's disposal and the stimulusat hand, assures education. Intellectual stimulus was precisely whather home furnished. "I was reared in an atmosphere of highintelligence. My father had uncommon mental vigor. So had my brothers. Their daily habits and pursuits and pleasures, were intellectual, andI naturally imbibed from them a kindred taste. Their talk was not ofbeeves, nor of making money; that now universal passion had notentered into men and possessed them as it does now, or if it had, itwas not in the sanctuary of our home, --there the money-changers didnot come. "

The more we know of her home life, the less wonder we have at hermental development. She says that "at the age of eight, my father, whenever he was at home, kept me up and at his side till nine o'clockin the evening, to listen to him while he read aloud to the familyHume, or Shakspere, or Don Quixote, or Hudibras. Certainly I did notunderstand them, but some glances of celestial light reached my soul, and I caught from his magnetic sympathy some elevation of feeling, andthat love of reading which has been to me an education. " A moderngirl is liable to nervous prostration without being kept up till nineon such juvenile literature as Hume and Shakspere at the age of eight;but Miss Sedgwick was a country girl who, in youth, lived out of doorsand romped like a boy and, at the age of fifty, led a party of youngnieces through France, Switzerland, and Italy, much of the way on footand always at their head. Always fortune's favorite, she enjoyed amongother things remarkably good health. 

She thinks she was ten years old when she read Rollin's AncientHistory, spending the noon intermission, when of course she ought tohave been at play, out of sight under her desk, where she "read, andmunched, and forgot myself in Cyrus's greatness. "

A winter in New York, where she afterward spent so much of her time, was her first absence from home. She had a married sister there whosehusband was in government employ, and her oldest brother was therestudying law. She was eleven years old; the date was 1801; and herbusiness in New York seems to have been to attend a French DancingSchool of which at that era there was but one in the city. She saw herfirst play, and used to dry the still damp newspaper, in hereagerness to read the theatre announcements. She also experienced avery severe humiliation. She, with her brother, Theodore, attended alarge dinner party at the house of a friend of her father. "Our hostasked me, the only stranger guest, which part of a huge turkey, inwhich he had put his carving fork, I would take. I knew only one pointof manners for such occasions, dear Alice, --that I must specify somepart, and as ill luck would have it, the side-bone came first into myhead, and 'Side-bone, sir, ' I said. Oh what a lecture I got when wegot home, the wretched little chit that compelled a gentleman to cutup a whole turkey to serve her! I cried myself to sleep that night. "It was too bad to spoil that dinner party for the little girl. 

Her mother died when Miss Sedgwick was seventeen; her father when shewas twenty-three. All her brothers and sisters were married andliving, three of them in New York city, one in Albany, and one, heryoungest brother, in Lenox. With this brother in Lenox, Miss Sedgwickfor many happy years, had her home, at least her summer home, havingfive rooms in an annex to his house built for her, into which shegathered her household gods and where she dispensed hospitality toher friends. For many years, New York city was generally her winterhome. 

Theoretically, we have arrived with this maiden at the age oftwenty-three, but we must go back and read from one or two earlyletters. She is ten years old when, under date of 1800, she writes herfather: "My dear papa, --Last week I received a letter from you whichgave me inexpressible pleasure. " This is the child's prattle of a girlof ten summers. She writes very circumspectly for her years of a newbrother-in-law: "I see--indeed I think I see in Mr. Watson everythingthat is amiable. I am very much pleased with him; indeed we all are. "The following is dated 1801, when she is eleven: "You say in your lastletters that the time will soon come when you will take leave ofCongress forever. That day shall I, in my own mind, celebrate forever;yes, as long as I live I shall reflect upon the dear time when my dearpapa left a public life to live in a retired one with his dear wifeand children; then you will have the pleasure to think, when you quitthe doors of the House, that you are going to join your familyforever; but, my dear papa, I cannot feel as you will when lookingback on your past life in Congress. You will remember how much youhave exerted yourself in order to save your country. "

There was something in the relations of this Sedgwick family, notperhaps without parallel, but very beautiful. These brothers andsisters write to each other like lovers. To her brother Robert, MissSedgwick writes, "I have just finished, my dear brother, the secondperusal of your kind letter received to-day. .. . I do love my brotherswith perfect devotedness, and they are such brothers as may putgladness into a sister's spirit. .. . Never, my dear Robert, did brotherand sister have a more ample experience of the purity of love, and thesweet exchange of offices of kindness that binds hearts indissolublytogether. "

There are three letters from Robert Sedgwick to show how hereciprocated this affection. He says: "I can never be sufficientlygrateful to my Maker for having given me such a sister. If I had noother sin to answer for than that of being so unworthy of her as I am, it would be more than I can bear, and yet when I read your letters Ialmost think that I am what I should be. I know I have a strongaspiration to be such, and I am sure they make me better as well ashappier. " Again, he says: "Thanks, thanks--how cold a word, my dearestKate, in return for your heart-cheering letter! It came to me in themidst of my Nol Pros. , special verdicts, depositions, protests, business correspondence, etc. , like a visitant from the skies. Indeed, my dearest Kate, you may laugh at me if you will for saying so, butthere is something about your influence over me which seems to haveshuffled off this mortal coil of earthiness; to be unmixed withanything that remains to be perfected; to be perfectly spiritualized, and yet to retain its contact with every part of its subject. .. . LestI should talk foolishly on this subject, I will dismiss it, onlybegging you not to forget how your letters cheer, rejoice, elevate, renovate me. "

Here is a love-letter from Theodore, her eldest brother: "Having thismoment perused your letter the third time, I could not help giving youan answer to it, though there be nothing in it interrogative. Nor wasit meant to be tender or sentimental, or learned, but like all yourletters, it is so sweet, so excellent, so natural, so much withoutart, and yet so much beyond art, that, old, cold, selfish, unthankfulas I am, the tears are in my eyes, and I thank God that I have such asister. " Let us revenge ourselves upon these brother and sister loversby saying that perhaps they did not feel any more than some otherpeople, only they had a habit of expressing their feelings. If thatwas all, we cannot deny that the habit was very beautiful. 

Why did Miss Sedgwick never marry? We are not distinctly told; but shedid not need to, with such lovers in her own family. Besides, howcould she find any one, in her eyes, equal to those brothers, and howcould she marry any one of lower merit? "I am satisfied, " she writes, "by long and delightful experience, that I can never love any bodybetter than my brothers. I have no expectation of ever finding theirequal in worth and attraction, therefore--do not be alarmed; I am noton the verge of a vow of celibacy, nor have I the slightest intentionof adding any rash resolutions to the ghosts of those that have beenfrightened to death by the terrors of maiden life; but therefore--Ishall never change my condition until I change my mind. " This is atthe age of twenty-three. 

Later in life, after many changes had come, she seems to have wishedshe had not been so very hard to suit. Fifteen years roll away, during which we see one suitor after another, dismissed, when shewrites in a journal not to be read in her life-time, "It is difficultfor one who began life as I did, the primary object of affection tomany, to come by degrees to be first to none, and still to have mylove remain in its full strength, and craving such returns as have nosubstitute. .. . It is the necessity of a solitary condition, anunnatural state. .. . From my own experience I would not advise any oneto remain unmarried, for my experience has been a singularly happyone. My feelings have never been embittered by those slights andtaunts that the repulsive and neglected have to endure; there has beenno period of my life to the present moment when I might not haveallied myself respectably, and to those sincerely attached to me. .. . Ihave troops of friends, some devotedly attached to me, and yet theresult of this very happy experience is that there is no substitutefor those blessings which Providence has placed first, and ordainedthat they shall be purchased at the dearest sacrifice. " Those who havepaid the price and purchased the blessings may have the satisfactionof knowing that, according to Miss Sedgwick's mature opinion, theyhave chosen the better part. 

We might call this statement the Confessions of an Old Maid who mighthave done better. She closes her testimony with an acknowledgment thatshe "ought to be grateful and humble, " and the "hope, through thegrace of God, to rise more above the world, to attain a higher andhappier state of feeling, to order my house for that better worldwhere self may lose something of its engrossing power. " This religiousattitude was not unusual, nor merely conventional and unmeaning. Allthe Sedgwick family seem to have been constitutionally religious. Themother was almost painfully meek in her protest against her husband'sembarking upon a public career; Mr. Sedgwick has been deterred fromjoining a church only by some impossible articles of puritan divinity, but cannot die happy until he has received the communion from Dr. Channing; "both my sisters were very religious, " says Miss Sedgwick;while the letters I have quoted from two of her brothers, younglawyers and men of the world, have the devoutness of the psalms. "Ican never be sufficiently grateful to my Maker for having given mesuch a sister, " says Robert; and Theodore: "selfish, unthankful as Iam, the tears are in my eyes, and I thank God that I have such asister. " Of course one can use a religious dialect without meaningmuch by it, but these Sedgwicks were cultivated people, who thoughtfor themselves, and did not speak cant to each other. 

Since it was a religious impulse that turned Miss Sedgwick's mind toliterature, it is worth while to follow the thread of her spiritualhistory. This was written at the age of twenty when she was lookingfor a religious experience that never came, and would have consideredherself one of the wicked: "On no subject would I voluntarily beguilty of hypocricy, and on that which involves all the importance ofour existence I should shrink from the slightest insincerity. Youmisunderstood my last letter. I exposed to you a state of mind andfeeling produced, not by religious impressions, but by the convictionsof reason. " Of course "reason" was no proper organ of religion; butbesides this defect, her interest in serious things was liable tointerruption "by the cares and pleasures of the world" and, perhapsworst of all, "I have not a fixed belief on some of the most materialpoints of our religion. " One does not see how a person in this stateof mind should have anything to call "our religion. " She seems to haveadvanced much further in a letter to her brother Robert, three yearslater: "I long to see you give your testimony of your acceptance ofthe forgiving love of your Master. 

. .. God grant, in his infinite mercy, that we may all touch thegarment of our Savior's righteousness and be made whole. "

The editor of these letters tells us that Miss Sedgwick is now amember of Dr. Mason's church in New York city, having joined at theage of twenty, or soon after the letter in which she says she is notsatisfied on certain points of doctrine. Dr. Mason is described as anundiluted Calvinist, "who then was the most conspicuous pulpit oratorin the country--a man confident in his faith and bold to audacity. "Miss Sedgwick stands the strong meat of Calvinism ten years, when wehave this letter. "I presume you saw the letter I wrote Susan, inwhich I said that I did not think I should go to Dr. Mason's Churchagain. .. . You know, my dear Frances, that I never adopted some of thearticles of the creed of that church and some of those upon which thedoctor is fond of expatiating, and which appear to me bothunscriptural and very unprofitable, and, I think, very demoralizing. "

What perhaps stimulated the zeal of Dr. Mason to insist upon doctrinesalways objectionable to Miss Sedgwick, was an attempt then being madeto establish a Unitarian church in New York city. She has not joinedin the movement, but does not know but it may come to that. It is acritical moment in Miss Sedgwick's history, and it happened at thistime she went to hear Dr. Mason's farewell sermon. "As usual, " shesays, "he gave the rational Christians an anathema. He said they hadfellowship with the devil: no, he would not slander the devil, theywere worse, etc. " Very possibly this preaching had its proper effectupon many hearers, and they gave the "rational Christians" a wideberth, but it precipitated Miss Sedgwick into their ranks. She was notthen a thorough-going Unitarian, saying, "there are some of yourarticles of unbelief that I am not Protestant enough to subscribe to";a little more gentleness on the part of Dr. Mason could have kept her, but she could not stand "what seems to me, " she says, "a grossviolation of the religion of the Redeemer, and an insult to a largebody of Christians entitled to respect and affection. "

She joined the tabooed circle in 1821, and wrote from Stockbridge, "Some of my friends here have, as I learn, been a little troubled, butafter the crime of confessed Unitarianism, nothing can surprise them";she longs to look upon a Christian minister who does not regard her as"a heathen and a publican. " An aunt, very fond of her, said to her, one day as they were parting, "Come and see me as often as you can, dear, for you know, after this world we shall never meet again. "

These religious tribulations incited her to write a short story, afterthe parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, to contrast two kinds ofreligion, of one of which she had seen more than was good. The storywas to appear as a tract, but it outgrew the dimensions of a tract, and was published as a book under the title of "A New England Tale. "It is not a masterpiece of literature but, like all of Miss Sedgwick'sworks, it contains some fine delineations of character and vividdescriptions of local scenery. It can be read to-day with interest andpleasure. As a dramatic presentation of the self-righteous and themeek, in a New England country town a century ago, it is veryeffective. "Mrs. Wilson" is perhaps a more stony heart than was commonamong the 'chosen vessels of the Lord, ' but so the Pharisee in theparable may have been a trifle exaggerated. The advantage of this kindof writing is that you do not miss the point of the story. 

Miss Dewey says The New England Tale gave Miss Sedgwick an "immediateposition in the world of American literature. " Her brother Theodorewrote, "It exceeds all my expectations, fond and flattering as theywere"; her brother Harry, "I think, dear Kate, that your destiny isfixed. As you are such a Bibleist, I only say don't put your lightunder a bushel. " That the book did not fall still-born is evident whenhe says further, "The orthodox do all they can to put it down. " On theother hand, her publisher wanted to print a cheap edition of 3, 000copies for missionary purposes. I should like to see that done to-dayby some zealous liberal-minded publisher. 

The New England Tale appeared in 1822, when Cooper had only published"Precaution" and "The Spy. " In 1824, Miss Sedgwick published"Redwood, " of which a second edition was called for the same year, and which was republished in England and translated into French. Itreached distinction in the character of Deborah Lenox, of which MissEdgworth said, "It is to America what Scott's characters are toScotland, valuable as original pictures. " Redwood was reviewed byBryant in the North American, in an article which, he says, was up tothat time his "most ambitious attempt in prose. " "Hope Leslie"appeared in 1827. It was so much better than its predecessors, saidthe _Westminster Review_, that one would not suppose it by the samehand. Sismondi, the Swiss historian, wrote the author a letter ofthanks and commendation, which was followed by a life-long friendshipbetween these two authors. Mrs. Child, then Miss Francis and theauthor of "Hobomok" and "The Rebels, " wrote her that she had nearlycompleted a story on Capt. John Smith which now she will not dare toprint, but she surrenders with less reluctance, she says, "for I lovemy conqueror. " "Is not that beautiful?" says Miss Sedgwick. "Better towrite and to feel such a sentiment than to indite volumes. "

"Clarence" was published in 1830, and I am glad to say, she sold therights to the first edition for $1, 200, before the critics got holdof it. The scene is laid in New York and in high life. The story, saidthe _North American Review_, is "improbable" but not "dull. " MissDewey says, "It is the most romantic and at the same time the wittiestof her novels, " but Bryant says it has been the least read. "TheLinwoods, or Sixty Years Since in America, " appeared in 1835, andBryant called it "a charming tale of home life, thought by many to bethe best of her novels properly so called. "

If Miss Sedgwick had written none of these more elaborate works, shewould deserve a permanent place in our literature for a considerablelibrary of short stories, among which I should name "A BerkshireTradition, " a pathetic tale of the Revolution; "The White Scarf, " aromantic story of Mediĉval France; "Fanny McDermot, " a study ofconventional morality; "Home, " of which the _Westminster Review_ said, "We wish this book was in the hands of every mechanic in England";"The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man" of which Joseph Curtis, thephilanthropist, said, "in all his experiences he had never known somuch good fruit from the publication of any book"; and, not least, "Live and let Live: or domestic service illustrated, " of which Dr. Channing wrote, "I cannot, without violence to my feelings, refrainfrom expressing to you the great gratification with which I have readyour 'Live and let Live. ' Thousands will be better and happier forit. .. . Your three last books, I trust, form an era in our literature. "

This was high praise, considering that there was then no higherliterary authority in America than Dr. Channing. However, a messagefrom Chief Justice Marshall, through Judge Story, belongs with it:"Tell her I have read with great pleasure everything she has written, and wish she would write more. " She had gained an enviable position inliterature and she had done a great deal of useful work during thefifteen years since the timid appearance of "A New England Tale, " butshe seems to have regarded her books as simply a "by-product": "Myauthor existence has always seemed something accidental, extraneous, and independent of my inner self. My books have been a pleasantoccupation and excitement in my life. .. . But they constitute noportion of my happiness--that is, of such as I derive from the dearestrelations of life. When I feel that my writings have made any onehappier or better, I feel an emotion of gratitude to Him who has mademe the medium of any blessing to my fellow creatures. "

In 1839, Miss Sedgwick went to Europe in company with her brotherRobert, and other relatives. The party was abroad two years and, onits return, Miss Sedgwick collected her European letters and publishedthem in two volumes. They give one a view of Europe as seen by anintelligent observer still in the first half of the last century. Shebreakfasted with Rogers, the banker and poet, with whom she metMacaulay whose conversation was to her "rich and delightful. Somemight think he talks too much; but none, except from their ownimpatient vanity, could wish it were less. " She had tea at Carlyle's, found him "simple, natural and kindly, his conversation as picturesqueas his writings. " She "had an amusing evening at Mr. Hallam's"; hemade her "quite forget he was the sage of the 'Middle Ages. '" AtHallam's she met Sydney Smith who was "in the vein, and we saw him, Ibelieve, to advantage. His wit is not, as I expected, a succession ofbrilliant explosions but a sparkling stream of humor. "

In Geneva, she visited her friends, the Sismondis, and in Turinreceived a call from Silvio Pellico, martyr to Italian liberty. "He isof low stature and slightly made, a sort of etching of a man withdelicate and symmetrical features, just enough body to gravitate andkeep the spirit from its natural upward flight--a more shadowy Dr. Channing. "

Soon after Miss Sedgwick's return from Europe, she became connectedwith the Women's Prison Association of New York City, of which from1848 to 1863 she was president. An extract from one letter mustsuffice to suggest the nature of her activities in connection withthis and kindred philanthropies: "It is now just ten, and I have comeup from the City Hall, in whose dismal St. Giles precincts I have beento see a colored ragged school. .. . My Sundays are not days of rest. .. . My whole soul is sickened; and to-day when I went to church filledwith people in their fine summer clothes, and heard a magnificentsermon from Dr. Dewey, and thought of the streets and dens throughwhich I had just walked, I could have cried out, Why are ye here?"

A fellow-member of the Prison Association, who often accompanied heron her visits to hospitals and prisons, "especially the Tombs, Blackwell's, and Randall's Island, " says, "In her visitations, she wascalled upon to kneel at the bedside of the sick and dying. Thesweetness of her spirit, and the delicacy of her nature, felt by allwho came within her atmosphere, seemed to move the unfortunate to askthis office of her, and it was never asked in vain. "

Always a philanthropist, Miss Sedgwick was not a "reformer" in thetechnical sense; that is, she did not enlist in the "movements" of hergeneration, for Temperance, or Anti-Slavery, or Woman's Rights. Sheshrunk from the excesses of the "crusaders, " but she was never slow instriking a blow in a good cause. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published in1852, but its indictment of slavery is not more complete than MissSedgwick made in "Redwood, " her second novel, twenty-five yearsbefore. A planter's boy sees a slave starved to famishing and thenwhipped to death. It hurt his boy heart, but he afterward becamehardened to such necessary severity and he tells the story to a fellowplanter with apologies for his youthful sentimentality. Does "UncleTom's Cabin" show more clearly the two curses of slavery: cruelty tothe slave and demoralization to the master?

She sympathized with the abolitionists in their purpose but not alwayswith their methods: "The great event of the past week has been thevisit of the little apostle of Abolitionism--Lucy Stone. " This was in1849 when Mrs. Stone was thirty-one. "She has one of the very sweetestvoices I ever heard, a readiness of speech and grace that furnish theexternal qualifications of an orator--a lovely countenance too--andthe intensity, entire forgetfulness and the divine calmness that fither to speak in the great cause she has undertaken. " But in spite ofthis evident sympathy with the purpose of the Abolitionists, MissSedgwick declined to attend a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, saying: "It seemed to me that so much had been intemperately said, somuch rashly urged, on the death of that noble martyr, John Brown, bythe Abolitionists, that it was not right to appear among them as oneof them. "

Not even Lucy Stone, however, could have felt more horror at theinstitution of slavery. The Compromise Measures of 1850 made hershudder: "my hands are cold as ice; the blood has curdled in myheart; that word _compromise_ has a bad savor when truth and right arein question. " When the Civil War came, in her seventieth year, she had"an intense desire to live to see the conclusion of the struggle, " butcould not conjecture "how peace and good neighborhood are ever tofollow from this bitter hate. " "It is delightful to see the gallantryof some of our men, who are repeating the heroic deeds that seemedfast receding to fabulous times. " Some of these young heroes were verynear to her. Maj. William Dwight Sedgwick, who fell on the bloodyfield of Antietam was her nephew, Gen. John Sedgwick, killed at thebattle of Spottsylvania, was her cousin. 

As she was not in the Anti-Slavery crusade, so she was not in theWoman's Rights crusade. She wished women to have a larger sphere, andshe did much to enlarge the sphere of her sex, but it was by taking itand making it, rather than by talking about it. "Your _might_ must beyour _right_, " she says in a chapter on The Rights of Women, in "Meansand Ends. " Voting did not seem to her a function suited to women: "Icannot believe it was ever intended that women should lead armies, harangue in halls of legislation, bustle up to ballot-boxes, or siton judicial tribunals. " The gentle Lucy Stone would not haveconsidered this argument conclusive, but it satisfied Miss Sedgwick. 

In 1857, after a silence of twenty-two years, in which only shortstories and one or two biographies came from her hand, she publishedanother two-volume novel entitled, "Married or Single. " It is perhapsher best work; at least it has been so considered by many readers. Shewas then sixty-seven and, though she had ten more years to live, theywere years of declining power. These last years were spent at the homeof her favorite niece, Mrs. William Minot, Jr. , in West Roxbury, Mass. , and there tenderly and reverently cared for, she died in 1867. 

Bryant, who was her life-long friend, and who, at her instance wrotesome of his hymns, gives this estimate of her character: "Admirable aswas her literary life, her home life was more so; and beautiful aswere the examples set forth in her writings, her own example was, ifpossible, still more beautiful. Her unerring sense of rectitude, herlove of truth, her ready sympathy, her active and cheerfulbeneficence, her winning and gracious manners, the perfection of highbreeding, make up a character, the idea of which, as it rests in mymind, I would not exchange for anything in her own interesting worksof fiction. "

II

MARY LOVELL WARE

[Illustration: MARY LOVELL WARE]

Of all the saints in the calendar of the Church there is no name moreworthy of the honor than that of Mary Lovell Ware. The college ofcardinals, which confers the degree of sainthood for the veneration offaithful Catholics, will never recognize her merits and encircle herhead with a halo, but when the list of Protestant saints is made up, the name of Mary L. Ware will be in it, and among the first half dozenon the scroll. 

The writer was a student in the Divinity School at Cambridge when aclassmate commended to him the Memoirs of Mrs. Ware as one of the fewmodel biographies. It was a book not laid down in the course of study;its reading was postponed for that convenient season for which onewaits so long; but he made a mental note of the "Memoirs of Mary L. Ware, " which many years did not efface. There is a book one must read, he said to himself, if he would die happy. 

Mrs. Ware's maiden name was Pickard. To the end of her days, when sheput herself in a pillory as she often did, she called herself by hermaiden name. "That, " she would say, "was Mary Pickard. " I infer thatshe thought Mary Pickard had been a very bad girl. 

Her mother's name was Lovell, --Mary Lovell, --granddaughter of "MasterLovell, " long known as a classical teacher in colonial Boston, anddaughter of James Lovell, an active Revolutionist, a prominent memberof the Continental Congress and, from the end of the war to his death, Naval officer in the Boston Custom House. Mr. Lovell had eight sons, one of whom was a successful London merchant, and one daughter, whoremained with her parents until at twenty-five she married Mr. Pickardand who, when her little girl was five years old returned, as perhapsan only daughter should, to take care of her parents in their old age. So it happened that the childhood of Mrs. Ware was passed at hergrandfather Lovell's, in Pearl St. , Boston, then an eligible place ofresidence. 

Mr. Pickard was an Englishman by birth, and a merchant with businessconnections in London and Boston, between which cities, for a time, his residence alternated. Not much is said of him in the Memoirs, beyond the fact that he was an Episcopalian with strong attachment tothe forms of his church, as an Englishman might be expected to be. 

Of Mrs. Pickard we learn more. She is said to have possessed a vigorousmind, to have been well educated and a fine conversationalist, with a commanding figure, benignant countenance, and dignifieddemeanor, so that one said of her, "She seems to have been born for anempress. " Like her husband she was an Episcopalian though, accordingto the Memoirs, less strenuously Episcopalian than Mr. Pickard. Shehad been reared in a different school. Her father, --Mr. JamesLovell--we are told, was a free-thinker, or as the Memoirs put it, "had adopted some infidel principles, " and "treated religion withlittle respect in his family. " The "infidels" of that day weregenerally good men, only they were not orthodox. Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Washington were such infidels. After Channing's day, thiskind of man here in New England was absorbed by the Unitarianmovement, and, as a separate class, disappeared. Mrs. Pickard was bredin this school and she appears never to have forgotten her hometraining. "She was unostentatious and charitable, " says an earlyfriend, "and her whole life was an exhibition of the ascendency of_principle_ over mere taste and feeling. "

Her religious attitude becomes interesting, because in an exceptionaldegree, she formed her remarkable daughter, --who was an only child anduntil the age of thirteen had no teacher except this forceful andlevel-headed mother. 

With these antecedents, Mary Lovell Pickard was born in Boston, October 2, 1798, John Adams being then President. In 1802, Mary havingpassed her third summer, Mr. Pickard's business called him to London, where he resided with his family two years, so that the child's fifthbirthday was duly celebrated in mid-ocean on the homeward voyage. In aletter of Mrs. Pickard, written during this London residence, shesays, "Mr. Pickard is even more anxious than I to go home. Mary is theonly contented one. She is happy all the time. " There is so much thatis sad in this record that, before we have done, the reader will beglad the little girl had at least a bright and sunny childhood toremember. It appears she did remember it. It may not be remarkable, but it is interesting, that the experiences of this early Londonlife, --between her third and fifth year, --made an indelibleimpression upon her, so that twenty years later when she was again inEngland, much to her own delight, she "recognized her old London homeand other objects with which she was then familiar. "

A lady who was a fellow passenger of the Pickards on their homewardvoyage was struck by the gentle management of the mother and the easydocility of the child. To say, "It will make me unhappy if you dothat, " was an extreme exercise of maternal authority, to which thechild yielded unresisting obedience. This, of course, is told to thecredit of the child, but the merit, probably belongs to the mother. Doubtless we could all have such children if we were that kind of aparent. A little tact, unfailing gentleness, and an infinite selfcontrol: with these, it would seem one may smile and kiss a child intoan angel. 

On arriving in Boston, Mrs. Pickard took her family to her father's, where she remained until her death, and where, we read, "with parentsand grandparents, Mary found a home whose blessings filled her heart. "Being an only child, with four elderly persons, Mary was likely to betoo much petted or too much fretted. We are glad to know that she wasnot fretted or over-trained. In a letter of retrospect, she writes, "For many years a word of blame never reached my ears. " An earlyfriend of the family writes, "It has been said that Mary was muchindulged; and I believe it may be said so with truth. But she was notindulged in idleness, selfishness, and rudeness; she was indulged inhealthful sports, in pleasant excursions, and in companionship withother children. "

Everything went smoothly with her until the age of ten when, ratherearlier than most children, she discovered her conscience: "At tenyears of age I waked up to a sense of the danger of the state ofindulgence in which I was living"; but let us hope the crisis was notacute. It does not seem to have been. According to the testimony ofher first teacher, she was simply precocious morally, but not at allmorbid. Her school was at Hingham, whither she was sent at the age ofthirteen. The teacher says that with her "devotedness to the highestobjects and purposes of our existence, she was one of the most livelyand playful girls among her companions, and a great favorite with themall. "

There seems to have been really no cloud upon her existence up to thispoint, --the age of thirteen. I have had a reason for dwelling uponthis charming period of her childhood, untroubled by a cloud, becausefrom this date until her death, the hand of God seems to have beenvery heavy upon her, afflictions fell upon her like rain, and itrequired a brave spirit to carry the burdens appointed for her tobear. Happily, she had a brave spirit, did not know that her life washard, "gloried in tribulation, " like St. Paul, and was never morecheerful or thankful than when she was herself an invalid, with aninvalid husband to be cared for like a baby, seven children to beclothed and fed, and not enough money at the year's end to squareaccounts. Ruskin tells of a servant who had served his motherfaithfully fifty-seven years. "She had, " he says, "a natural gift andspecialty for doing disagreeable things; above all, the service of thesick-room; so that she was never quite in her glory unless some of uswere ill. " It will be seen further on that these were only a part ofthe accomplishments of Mrs. Ware. It is fortunate if a woman is somade that her spirits rise as her troubles thicken, but the reader ofthe story will be thankful that her life was not all a battle, thather childhood was more than ordinarily serene and sunny, and that notfor a dozen years at least, did she have to be a heroine in order tobe happy. 

Mary had been in Hingham about half a year, enjoying her school-girllife, when her mother was taken ill, fatally ill as it proved, and thechild, then at the age of thirteen, was called home and installed inthe sick-room as nurse. This was the beginning of sorrow. The motherlingered through the winter and died in the following May. Thereremained of the family, the grandparents, one son of fine talents, butof unfortunate habits, and her father, "broken in spirits and infortune, clinging to his only child with doting and dependentaffection. " We can see that it could not have been a cheerful home fora young girl of thirteen. Some thirty years later, she wrote to one ofher children, "I think I have felt the want all my life of a morecheerful home in my early childhood, a fuller participation in thepleasures and 'follies' of youth. " I put this reflection here, becauseit does not apply to the years preceding the loss of her mother whileit exactly fits the period that now follows. 

The year following her mother's death, Mary attended a girls' schoolin Boston. A passage from a letter written at this period will showsomething of her quality. It is dated February 27, 1813, when she wasfourteen and a few months. Besides, she had been at school, six monthsat a time, a total of about one year. She had been mentioning two orthree novels, and then discourses as follows: "Novels are generallysupposed to be improper books for young people, as they take up thetime which ought to be employed in more useful pursuits; which iscertainly very true; but as a recreation to the mind, such books asthese cannot possibly do any hurt, as they are good moral lessons. Indeed, I think there is scarcely any book from which some good maynot be derived; though it cannot be expected that any young person hasjudgment enough to leave all the bad and take only the good, whenthere is a great proportion of the former. " Perhaps I am wrong inthinking this an exhibition of remarkable reflection and expression ina girl well under fifteen, whether she had been at school orotherwise. Mrs. Ware was always a wonderful letter-writer, though, ifwe take her word for it, she had little of her mother's gift as aconversationalist. It seems to have been a life-long habit to see theold year out and the new year in, spending the quiet hours in writingletters to her friends. In one of these anniversary letters, writtenwhen she was fifteen, she says, "I defy anyone to tell from myappearance that I have not everything to make me happy. I have muchand am happy. My little trials are essential to my happiness. " In thatlast sentence we have the entire woman. Her trials were always, as shethought, essential to her happiness. 

On this principle, her next twelve years ought to have been veryhappy, since they were sufficiently full of tribulation. The two yearsfollowing her mother's death, passed in the lonely home in Boston, were naturally depressing. Besides, she was born for religion, and theexperience through which she had passed had created a great hunger inher soul. Trinity Church, into which she had been baptized, had notyet passed through the hands of Phillips Brooks, and itsministrations, admirable as they are for the ordinary child, wereinadequate for the wants of a thoughtful girl like Mary Pickard. Thefinal effect was, she says, to throw her more upon herself and tocompel her to seek, "by reading, meditation and prayer, to find thatknowledge and stimulus to virtue which I failed to find in theministrations of the Sabbath. "

At this critical period, she returned to the school at Hingham, whichshe had left two years before, and there, in the Third Church, thenpresided over by Rev. Henry Colman, one of the fathers of theUnitarian heresy, she found peace and satisfaction to her spirit. Tenyears later, she spent a week in Hingham, visiting friends andreviving, as she says, the memory of the "first awakening of my mindto high and holy thoughts and resolves. " The crisis which, elsewhere, we read of at the age of ten, was a subordinate affair. This Hinghamexperience, at the age of sixteen, was really the moral event in herhistory. 

As hers was a type of religion, --she would have said "piety", --a blendof reason and sentiment, peculiar to the Unitarianism of thatgeneration, hardly to be found in any household of faith to-day, wemust let her disclose her inner consciousness. One Saturday morning, she writes a long letter to one of her teachers saying that she feelsit a duty and a privilege "to be a member of the Church of Christ, "but she fears she does not understand what the relation implies, andsays, "Tell me if you should consider it a violation of the sacrednessof the institution, to think I might with impunity be a member of it. I am well aware of the condemnation denounced on those who _partake_unworthily. " She refers to the Lord's Supper. It is to be hoped thather teacher knew enough to give the simple explanation of that darksaying of the apostle about eating unworthily. At all events, sheconnected herself with the church, received the communion, and wasvery happy. "From the moment I had decided what to do, not a feelingarose which I could wish to suppress; conscious of pure motives, allwithin was calm, and I wondered how I could for a moment hesitate. They were feelings I never before experienced, and for once I realizedthat it is only when we are at peace with ourselves that we can enjoytrue happiness. .. . I could not sleep, and actually laid awake allnight out of pure happiness. "

After a few months, sooner than she expected, she returns to Bostonand sits under the ministrations of Dr. Channing, to her an object ofveneration. She writes that her heart is too full for utterance: "Itwill not surprise you that Mr. Channing's sermons are the cause; butno account that I could give could convey any idea of them. You haveheard some of the same class; they so entirely absorb the feelings asto render the mind incapable of action, and consequently leave on thememory at times no distinct impression. " I should like to quote allshe says of Channing, both as a revelation of him, and of herself. Sheheard him read the psalm, "What shall I render unto God for all hismercies?" and says, "The ascription of praise which followed was moretruly sublime than anything I ever heard or read. " It must have beenan event, --it certainly was for her, --to listen to one of Dr. Channing's prayers: "It seems often to me, while in the hour of prayerI give myself up to the thought of heaven, as though I had in realityleft the world, and was enjoying what is promised to the Christian. Ifear, however, these feelings are too often delusive; we substitutethe love of holiness for the actual possession. "

There her sanity comes in to check her emotionalism. She is reflectingupon another experience with Dr. Channing when she comes very nearmaking a criticism upon him. She tells us that she does not mean him;he is excepted from these remarks, but she says, "There are fewoccasions which will authorize a minister to excite the feelings of anaudience in a very great degree, and none which can make it allowablefor him to rest in mere excitement. " To complete the portraiture ofher soul, I will take a passage from a letter written at the age oftwenty-five, when death has at last stripped her of all her family, "Ibelieve that all events that befall us are exactly such as are bestadapted to improve us; and I find in a perfect confidence in thewisdom and love which I know directs them, a source of peace which noother thing can give; and in the difficulty which I find in actingupon this belief I see a weakness of nature, which those very trialsare designed to assist us in overcoming, and which trial alone canconquer. "

Mary Pickards were not common even in that generation, but this creedwas then common, and this blend of reason and religious feeling, fearlessly called "piety, " was characteristic of Channing, herteacher, and of Henry Ware, afterward her husband. It was the real"Channing Unitarianism. " Pity there is no more of it. 

Mary was sixteen years old, --to be exact, sixteen and a half; theserene and beautiful faith of Channing had done its perfect work uponher; and she was now ready for whatever fate, or as she would havesaid, Providence, might choose to send. It sent the business failureof Mr. Pickard, in which not only his own fortune was swept away butalso the estate of Mr. Lovell was involved. Upon the knowledge of thisdisaster, Mary wrote a cheerful letter, in which she said: "I shouldbe sorry to think you consider me so weak as to bend under a change offortune to which all are liable. " Certainly she will not bend, but sheis obliged to quit school and return to the shattered home. 

Before the summer was over, her grandfather, Mr. Lovell, died; whetherthe end was hastened by the financial embarrassments in which Mr. Pickard had involved him, is not said. Mrs. Lovell, the grandmother, followed her husband in two years, --for Mary, two years of assiduousnursing and tender care. Perhaps one sentence from a letter at thistime will assist us in picturing her in this exacting service. Shesays that she is leading a monotonous existence, that her animalspirits are not sufficient for both duty and solitude, "And whenevening closes, and my beloved charge is laid peacefully to rest, excitement ceases, and I am thrown on myself for pleasure. "

With the death of the grandmother, the home was broken up, and Mary, trying to help her father do a little business without capital, wentto New York city as his commercial agent. Her letters to her fatherare "almost exclusively business letters, " and he on his part givesher "directions for the sale and purchase, not only of muslins andmoreens, but also of skins, saltpetre, and the like. "

Details of this period of her career are not abundant in the Memoirs, and the death of her father, in 1823, put an end to her businessapprenticeship. 

Apparently, she was not entirely destitute. At the time of hisdisaster, her father wrote, "As we calculated you would, after sometime, have enough to support yourself, without mental or bodilyexertion. " That is, presumably, after the settlement of hergrandfather's estate. As her biographer says, "Every member of her ownfamily had gone, and she had smoothed the passage of everyone. " Butshe had many friends, and one is tempted to say, Pity she could nothave settled down in cozy quarters and made herself comfortable. 

Indeed she did make a fair start. She joined a couple of friends, going abroad in search of health, for a visit to England. She hadrelatives on the Lovell side, in comfortable circumstances nearLondon, and an aunt on her father's side, in the north of England, instraightened circumstances. She resolved to make the acquaintance ofall these relatives. 

The party arrived in Liverpool in April, 1824, and for a year and ahalf, during which their headquarters were in London, Paris wasvisited, Southern England and Wales were explored, and finally theLovell relatives were visited and found to have good hearts and openarms. For these eighteen months, Mary Pickard's friends could havewished her no more delightful existence. She had tea with Mrs. Barbauld, heard Irving, then the famous London preacher, and saw otherinteresting persons and charming things in England. There is materialfor a very interesting chapter upon this delightful experience. It wasfollowed by a drama of misery and horror, in which she was bothspectator and actor, when young and old died around her as if smittenby pestilence, and her own vigorous constitution was irreparablybroken. 

This episode was vastly more interesting to her than the pleasantcommonplace of travel, and much more in keeping with what seems tohave been her destiny. In the autumn of her second year abroad, shewent to discover her aunt, sister of Mr. Pickard, in Yorkshire. Thewriter of the Memoirs says that this visit "forms the most remarkableand in some respects the most interesting and important chapter of herlife. " She found her aunt much better than she expected, nearlyoverpowered with joy to see her, living in a little two story cottageof four rooms, which far exceeded anything she ever saw for neatness. The village bore the peculiarly English name of Osmotherly, and wasthe most primitive place she had ever been in. The inhabitants wereall of one class and that the poorer class of laborers, ignorant aspossible, but simple and sociable. Terrible to relate, smallpox, typhus fever, and whooping cough were at that moment epidemic in thatvillage. 

It will be impossible to put the situation before us more briefly thanby quoting a passage from one of her letters: "My aunt's two daughtersare married and live in this village; one of them, with threechildren, has a husband at the point of death with a fever; hisbrother died yesterday of smallpox, and two of her children have thewhooping-cough; added to this, their whole dependence is upon theirown exertions, which are of course entirely stopped now. .. . You maysuppose, under such a state of things, I shall find enough to do. "

The death of the husband, whom of course Miss Pickard nursed throughhis illness, is reported in the next letter, which contains also thischaracteristic statement, "It seems to me that posts of difficulty aremy appointed lot and my element, for I do feel lighter and happierwhen I have difficulties to overcome. Could you look in upon me youwould think it impossible that I could be even tolerably comfortable, and yet I am cheerful, and get along as easily as possible, and am intruth happy. "

Evidently, all we can do with such a person is to congratulate herover the most terrible experiences. In a letter five days later, thebaby dies of whooping-cough, and in her arms; a fortnight later, themother dies of typhus fever; within another month, two boys, noworphans, are down with the same fever at once, and one of them dies. In the space of eight weeks, she saw five persons of one familyburied, and four of them she had nursed. By this time, the aunt wasill, and Miss Pickard nursed her to convalescence. 

This campaign had lasted three months, and she left the scene ofcombat with a clear conscience. She was allowed a breathing spell of amonth in which to visit some pleasant friends and recuperate herstrength, when we find her back in Osmotherly again nursing her aunt. It was the end of December and she was the only servant in the house. Before this ordeal was over, she was taken ill herself, and had to beput to bed and nursed. In crossing a room, a cramp took her; she fellon the floor, lay all night in the cold, calling in vain forassistance. She did not finally escape from these terrible scenesuntil the end of January, five months from the time she entered them. 

Miss Pickard returned to Boston after an absence of about two yearsand a half, during which time, as one of her friends wrote her, "Youhave passed such trying scenes, have so narrowly escaped, and donemore, much more, than almost any body ever did before. " She went awaya dear school-girl friend and a valued acquaintance; she was welcomedhome as a martyr fit to be canonized, and was received as aconquering heroine. 

In a letter dated from Gretna Green, where so many run-away lovershave been made happy, she playfully reflects upon the possibilities ofher visit, if only she had a lover, and concludes that she "mustsubmit to single blessedness a little longer. " Our sympathies wouldhave been less taxed if she had submitted to single blessedness to theend. Why could she not now be quiet, let well enough alone, and makeherself comfortable? Destiny had apparently ordered things for herquite differently. One cannot avoid his destiny, and it was herdestiny to marry, and marriage was to bring her great happiness, tempered by great sorrows. 

The man who was to share her happiness and her sorrows was Rev. HenryWare, Jr. , then the almost idolized minister of the Second Church, inBoston. Mr. Ware was the son of another Henry Ware, professor oftheology at Harvard, whose election to the chair of theology in 1806opened the great Unitarian controversy. Two sons of Professor Wareentered the ministry, Henry and William, the latter the firstUnitarian minister settled in New York city. Rev. John F. Ware, wellremembered as pastor of Arlington St. Church in Boston, was the sonof Henry, so that for more than half a century, the name of Ware was agreat factor in Unitarian history. 

After Dr. Channing, Henry Ware was perhaps the most popular preacherin any Boston pulpit. One sermon preached by him on a New Year's eve, upon the Duty of Improvement, became memorable. In spite of a violentsnow storm, the church was filled to overflowing, a delegation comingfrom Cambridge. Of this sermon, a hearer said: "No words from mortallips ever affected me like those. " There was a difference betweenUnitarian preaching then and now. That famous sermon closed like this:"I charge you, as in the presence of God, who sees and will judgeyou, --in the name of Jesus Christ, who beseeches you to come to himand live, --by all your hopes of happiness and life, --I charge you letnot this year die, and leave you impenitent. Do not dare to utterdefiance in its decaying hours. But, in the stillness of its awfulmidnight, prostrate yourselves penitently before your Maker; and letthe morning sun rise upon you, thoughtful and serious men. " One doesnot see how the so-called 'Evangelicals' could have quarreled withthat preaching. 

Mr. Ware had been in his parish nine years, his age was thirty-two, hewas in the prime of life, and at the climax of his power and hispopularity. Three years before, he had been left a widower with threeyoung children, one of whom became Rev. John F. Ware. That these twointensely religious natures, that of Mary Pickard and that of HenryWare, should have been drawn together is not singular. In writing tohis sister, Mr. Ware speaks tenderly of his late wife and says, "Ihave sought for the best mother to her children, and the best I havefound. " Late in life, one of these children said, "Surely God nevergave a boy such a mother or a man such a friend. "

Miss Pickard engaged to be a very docile wife. "Instead of theself-dependent self-governed being you have known me, " she writes to afriend, "I have learned to look to another for guidance andhappiness. " She is "as happy as mortal can be. " Indeed it was almosttoo much for earth. "It has made me, " she says, "more willing to leavethe world and enjoy the happiness of heaven than I ever thought Ishould be. Strange that a thing from which of all others, I shouldhave expected the very opposite effect, should have done this. "

The year following the marriage of these saintly lovers, --one can callthem nothing less, --was one of exceeding happiness and of immenseactivity to both. It is not said, but we can see that each must havebeen a tonic to the other. Considerate persons felt a scruple abouttaking any of the time of their pastor's wife. "Mrs. Ware, " said one, "at home and abroad, is the busiest woman of my acquaintance, " andothers felt that way. Before the year ended, Mrs. Ware had a boy babyof her own to increase her occupations and her happiness. It lived afew bright years, long enough to become a very attractive child and togive a severe wrench to her heart when it left her. This experienceseems to have a certain fitness in a life in which every joy was tobring sorrow and every sorrow, by sheer will, was to be turned to joy. 

Of Mr. Ware, it is said that this first year "was one of the mostactive and also, to all human appearance, one of the most successfulof his ministry. " He put more work into his sermons, gave increasedattention to the details of his parish, delivered a course oflectures, and undertook other enterprises, some of which arespecified; and, during a temporary absence of Mrs. Ware, wrote herthat he had hoped he had turned over a new leaf, "but by foolishdegrees, I have got back to all my accustomed carelessness and wasteof powers, and am doing nothing in proportion to what I ought to do. "

But man is mortal, and there is a limit to human endurance. Mr. Warecould not lash himself into greater activity; but he was in goodcondition to be ill. In a journey from Northampton, he was prostratedby inflammation of the lungs, with hemorrhages, and after severalweeks, Mrs. Ware, herself far from well, went to him and finallybrought him home. This was the beginning of what became a very regularannual experience. I met a lady who was brought up on the Memoirs ofMary L. Ware, and who briefly put what had impressed her most, in thisway: She said, "It seemed as though Mr. Ware was always going off on ajourney for his health, and that Mrs. Ware was always going after himto bring him home"; if we remember this statement, and add the factthat these calls came more than once when Mrs. Ware was on the sicklist herself, we shall be able greatly to shorten our history. 

This was the end of Mr. Ware's parish work. He was nursed through thewinter and, in early spring, Mrs. Ware left her baby and took herinvalid husband abroad, in pursuit of health, spending a year and ahalf in England, Holland, Switzerland, and Italy. It was, sheafterward said, the most trying period of her life. Mr. Warealternated between being fairly comfortable and very miserable, sothat these Memoirs say "He enjoyed much, but suffered more. " Still thetravels would be interesting if we had time to follow them. 

Near the close of the first year abroad, Mrs. Ware's second child wasborn in Rome, and, although this was as she would have said, "providential, " never was a child less needed in a family. Mrs. Warehad then two babies on her hands, and of these, her invalid husbandwas the greater care. In the following August, Mrs. Ware arrived inBoston with her double charge, and had the happiness to know that Mr. Ware was somewhat better in health than when he left home, a year anda half before. 

His parish, during his absence, had been in the care of a colleague, no other than the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson. If you remember the NewYear's Eve sermon of Mr. Ware, it will be evident that he must haveleft behind him a very conservative parish, and you will not besurprised that in about four years, Mr. Emerson found his chainsintolerable. 

Mr. Ware had been invited to a professorship in the Harvard DivinitySchool, and it was to this and not to his parish that he returned. Forthe steady, one might say monotonous, duties of his professorship, Mr. Ware's health was generally sufficient. The lecture room did not exactthe several hundred parish calls then demanded by a large city church, nor the exhausting effort which Mr. Ware and Dr. Channing put into thedelivery of a sermon; and the lectures, once prepared, could bedelivered and re-delivered from year to year. Real leisure wasimpossible to one of Mr. Ware's temperament, but here was a life ofcomparative leisure; and for Mrs. Ware, who shared all the joys andsorrows of her husband, the twelve years that follow brought a settledexistence and very much happiness. Neither her own health nor that ofher husband was ever very firm, and there was always a great emptinessin the family purse, but with Mrs. Ware, these were, as with Paul, "light afflictions" which were but for a moment, and she did not letthem disturb her happiness. 

Impossible as it may seem, they contributed to her happiness. She madethem contribute to it. She says in a letter of 1831, "Of my winter'ssickness I cannot write; it contained a long life of enjoyment, andwhat I hoped would be profitable thought and reflection. " She repeatsthis statement to another correspondent, and says, with apparentregret, that the illness did not bring her "to that cheerfulwillingness to resign my life, after which I strove. " You cannot sendthis woman any trial which she will not welcome, because she wants tobe made to want to go to heaven, and she is as yet not quite ready forit. 

Mr. Ware has been dangerously ill, and of course she could not spareherself for heaven until he recovered, but this trial did somethingquite as good for her: "My husband's danger renewed the so oftrepeated testimony that strength is ever at hand for those who needit, gave me another exercise of trust in that mighty arm which cansave to the uttermost, and in its result is a new cause for gratitudeto Him who has so abundantly blessed me all the days of my life. " Itis good to see what the old-fashioned doctrine that God really is, and is good, did for one who actually believed. 

That first baby, whom she left behind when she went abroad with herinvalid husband, died in 1831; the mother fainted when the last breathleft the little body; but this is the way she writes of it: "I havealways looked upon the death of children rather as a subject of joythan sorrow, and have been perplexed at seeing so many, who would bearwhat seemed to me much harder trials with firmness, so completelyoverwhelmed by this, as is frequently the case. "

After that, one is almost ashamed to mention the trifle that theincome of this family was very small. Mr. Ware, after 1834 _Dr. _ Ware, held a new professorship, the endowment of which was yet mostlyimaginary. The social demands took no account of the family income;the unexpected guest always dropping in; at certain times, it is said, "shoals of visitors;" and the larder always a little scantilyfurnished. If one wants to know how one ought to live under suchcircumstances, here is your shining example. "There were no apologiesat that table, " we are told. "If unexpected guests were not alwaysfilled, they were never annoyed, nor suffered to think much about it. ""I remember, " says a guest, "the wonder I felt at her humility anddignity in welcoming to her table on some occasion a troop ofaccidental guests, when she had almost nothing to offer but herhospitality. The absence of all apologies and of all mortification, the ease and cheerfulness of the conversation, which became the onlyfeast, gave me a lesson never forgotten, although never learned. "

The problem of dress was as simple to Mrs. Ware as was theentertainment of her guests. "As to her attire, " says an intimatefriend, "we should say no one thought of it at all, because of itssimplicity, and because of her ease of manners and dignity ofcharacter. Yet the impression is qualified, though in one viewconfirmed, by hearing that, in a new place of residence, so plain washer appearance on all occasions, the villagers suspected her ofreserving her fine clothes for some better class. " There are those whomight consider these circumstances, very sore privations. What Mrs. Ware says of them is, "I have not a word of complaint to make. We arefar better provided for than is necessary to our happiness. " I ampersuaded that this is an immensely wholesome example and that more ofthis kind of woman is needed to mother the children of our generation. In a letter to one of her daughters, she says she has great sympathywith the struggles of young people, that she had struggles too andlearned her lessons young, that she found very early in life that herown position was not in the least affected by these externals, "I soonbegan to look upon my oft-turned dress with something like pride, certainly with great complacency; and to see in that and all othermarks of my mother's prudence and consistency, only so many proofs ofher dignity and self-respect, --the dignity and self-respect which grewout of her just estimate of the true and the right in herself and inthe world. "

We have seen enough of this woman to discover that she could not bemade unhappy, and also to discover why. It was because her nature wasso large and strong and fine. Sometimes she thinks Dr. Ware would bebetter and happier in a parish, "But I have no care about the futureother than that which one must have, --a desire to fulfil the dutieswhich it may bring. " Surely that is being, "Self-poised and independent still On this world's varying good or ill. "

In 1842, Dr. Ware's health became so much impaired that Mrs. Wareentertains an unfulfilled desire. It is to get away from Cambridge, which had become so dear to them all. "I scruple not to say that aten-foot house, and bread and water diet, with a sense of rest to_him_, would be a luxury. " The family removed to Framingham, where Dr. Ware died, a year later. Whatever tribulations might be in store forMrs. Ware, anxiety on his account was not to be one of them. 

Death came on Friday; on Sunday, Mrs. Ware attended church with allher family, and the occasion must have been more trying for theminister who preached to her than for herself. A short service washeld that Sunday evening at six, and "Then, " she says, "John and Ibrought dear father's body to Cambridge in our own carriage; we couldnot feel willing to let strangers do anything in connection with himwhich we could do ourselves. " Think of that dark, silent lonely ridefrom Framingham to Cambridge! But here was a woman who did not spareherself, and did not ask what somebody would think of her doings. 

After this event, the Memoirs tell us that a gentleman in Milton gaveher a very earnest invitation to go there and take the instruction ofthree little children in connection with her own. In this occupationshe spent six years of great outward comfort and usefulness. There ismuch in these years, or in the letters of these years, of greatinterest and moral beauty. Even with young children to leave, shespeaks of death as serenely as she would of going to Boston. "I do notfeel that I am essential to my children. I do not feel that I amcompetent to train them. "

Of her last illness, one of her children wrote, "Never did a sick roomhave less of the odor of sickness than that. It was the brightest spoton earth. " "Come with a _smile_, " she said to a friend whom she hadsummoned for a last farewell, and so went this remarkable andexceptionally noble woman. 

III

LYDIA MARIA CHILD

[Illustration: LYDIA MARIA CHILD]

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, few names in Americanliterature were more conspicuous than that of Lydia Maria Child, andamong those few, if we except that of Miss Sedgwick, there wascertainly no woman's name. Speaking with that studied reserve whichbecame its dignity, the _North American Review_ said of her: "We arenot sure that any woman of our country could outrank Mrs. Child. Thislady has been before the public as an author with much success. Andshe well deserves it, for in all her works, nothing can be found whichdoes not commend itself by its tone of healthy morality and goodsense. Few female writers if any have done more or better things forour literature in the lighter or graver departments. "

Mrs. Child began her literary career in 1824 with "Hobomok, a Tale ofEarly Times, " and she closed it with a volume of biography, entitled"Good Wives, " in 1871. Between these two dates, covering forty-sevenyears, her publications extended to more than thirty titles, andinclude stories, poems, biographies, studies in history, in householdeconomics, in politics, and in religion. "Her books, " says Col. Higginson, "never seemed to repeat each other and belonged to almostas many different departments as there are volumes"; and while writingso much, he adds, "she wrote better than most of her contemporaries. "

If she had not done many things so well, she would still have thedistinction of having done several things the first time they wereever done at all. It has been claimed that she edited the firstAmerican magazine for children, wrote the first novel of puritantimes, published the first American Anti-Slavery book, and compiledthe first treatise upon what is now known as "Comparative Religions, "a science not then named, but now a department in every school oftheology. 

Mrs. Child's maiden name was Francis, and under that name she won herfirst fame. She was born in Medford, Mass. , Feb. 11, 1802. Her father, Convers Francis, is said to have been a worthy and substantialcitizen, a baker by trade, and the author of the "Medford Crackers, "in their day second only in popularity to "Medford Rum. " He was a manof strong character, great industry, uncommon love of reading, zealous anti-slavery convictions, generous and hospitable. All thesetraits were repeated in his famous daughter. It was the custom of Mr. Francis, on the evening before Thanksgiving to gather in hisdependents and humble friends to the number of twenty or thirty, andfeast them on chicken pie, doughnuts and other edibles, sending themhome with provisions for a further festival, including "turnovers" forthe children. Col. Higginson, who had the incident from Mrs. Child, intimates that in this experience she may have discovered how muchmore blessed it is to give than to receive. Certainly, in later life, she believed and practiced this doctrine like a devotee. 

Mrs. Child began to climb the hill of knowledge under the instructionof a maiden lady known as "Ma'am Betty, " who kept school in herbedroom which was never in order, drank from the nose of hertea-kettle, chewed tobacco and much of it, and was shy to a degreesaid to have been "supernatural, " but she knew the way to the heartsof children, who were very fond of her and regularly carried her aSunday dinner. After "Ma'am Betty, " Mrs. Child attended the publicschools in Medford and had a year at a Medford private seminary. 

These opportunities for education were cut off at the age of twelveapparently by some change in the family fortunes which compelled theremoval of Maria to Norridgewock, Maine, on the borders of the greatnorthern wilderness, where a married sister was living. An influenceto which she gave chief credit for her intellectual development andwhich was not wholly cut off by this removal was that of ConversFrancis, her favorite brother, next older than herself, afterwardminister in Watertown, and professor in the Divinity School of HarvardUniversity. In later life, Dr. Francis was an encyclopedia ofinformation and scholarship, very liberal in his views for the time. Theodore Parker used to head pages in his journal with, "Questions toask Dr. Francis. "

Dr. Francis began to prepare for college when Mrs. Child was nineyears old. Naturally the little girl wanted to read the books whichher brother read, and sometimes he seems to have instructed her andsometimes he tantalized her, but always he stimulated her. Yearsafterward she wrote him gratefully, "To your early influence, byconversation, letters, and example I owe it that my busy energiestook a literary direction at all. "

Norridgewock, her home from her twelfth to her eighteenth year, wasand is a very pretty country village, at that era the residence ofsome very cultivated families, but hardly an educational center. As wehear nothing of schools either there or elsewhere we are led tosuppose that this twelve year old girl had finished her education. Ifshe lacked opportunities for culture, she carried with her a desirefor it, which is half the battle, and she had the intellectualstimulus of letters from her brother then in college, who seems tohave presided over her reading. What we know of her life at thisperiod is told in her letters to this brother. 

The first of these letters which the editors let us see was written atthe age of fifteen. "I have, " she says, "been busily engaged readingParadise Lost. Homer hurried me along with rapid impetuosity; everypassion that he portrayed I felt; I loved, hated, and resented just ashe inspired me. But when I read Milton I felt elevated 'above thisvisible, diurnal sphere. ' I could not but admire such astonishinggrandeur of description, such heavenly sublimity of style. Much as Iadmire Milton, I must confess that Homer is a much greater favorite. "

It is not strange that a studious brother in college would takeinterest in a sister who at the age of fifteen could write him with somuch intelligence and enthusiasm of her reading. The next letter istwo years later when she has been reading Scott. She likes MegMerrilies, Diana Vernon, Annot Lyle, and Helen Mac Gregor. She hopesshe may yet read Virgil in his own tongue, and adds, "I usually spendan hour after I retire for the night in reading Gibbon's Roman Empire. The pomp of his style at first displeased me, but I think him an ablehistorian. "

This is from a girl of seventeen living on the edge of the northernwilderness, and she is also reading Shakspere. "What a vigorous graspof intellect, " she says, "what a glow of imagination he must havepossessed, but when his fancy drops a little, how apt he is to makelow attempts at wit, and introduce a forced play upon words. " She isalso reading the Spectator, and does not think Addison so good awriter as Johnson, though a more polished one. 

What she was doing with her ever busy hands during this period we arenot told, but her intellectual life ran on in these channels untilshe reaches the age of eighteen, when she is engaged to teach a schoolin Gardiner, Maine, an event which makes her very happy. "I cannottalk about books, " she writes, "nor anything else until I tell you thegood news, that I leave Norridgewock as soon as the travelling istolerable and take a school in Gardiner. " It is the terrible month ofMarch, for country roads in the far north, "the saddest of the year. "She wishes her brother were as happy as she is, though, "All I expectis that, if I am industrious and prudent, I shall be independent. "

At the conclusion of her school, she took up her residence with herbrother in Watertown, Mass. , where one year before, he had beensettled as minister of the first parish. Here a new career openedbefore her. Whittier says that in her Norridgewock period, when shefirst read Waverly at the house of her physician, she laid down thebook in great excitement, exclaiming, "Why cannot I write a novel?"Apparently, she did not undertake the enterprise for two years ormore. In 1824, one Sunday after morning service, in her brother'sstudy, she read an article in the _North American Review_, in which itwas pointed out that there were great possibilities of romance inearly American history. Before the afternoon service, she had writtenthe first chapter of a novel which was published anonymously the sameyear, under the title of "Hobomok: a Tale of Early Times. "

A search through half a dozen Antique Book stores in Boston for a copyof this timid literary venture I have found to be fruitless, exceptfor the information that there is sometimes a stray copy in stock, andthat its present value is about three dollars. It is sufficientdistinction that it was the first attempt to extract a romanticelement from early New England history. Its reception by the publicwas flattering to a young author. The Boston Athenĉum sent her aticket granting the privileges of its library. So great and perhapsunexpected had been its success that for several years, Mrs. Child'sbooks bore the signature, "By the author of Hobomok. " Even "The FrugalHousewife" was "By the author of Hobomok. "

In 1825, the author of Hobomok published her second novel, entitled, "The Rebels: a Tale of the Revolution. " It is a volume of about 300pages, and is still very readable. It ran rapidly through severaleditions, and very much increased the reputation of the author ofHobomok. The work contains an imaginary speech of James Otis, inwhich it is said, "England might as well dam up the Nile withbulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm inthis youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens ofScotland or couches herself among the magnificent mountains ofSwitzerland. " This supposed speech of Otis soon found its way into theSchool Readers of the day, as a genuine utterance of the Revolutionarypatriot, and as such Col. Higginson says he memorized and declaimedit, in his youth. 

This literary success was achieved at the age of twenty-three, and thesame year Miss Francis opened a private school in Watertown, which shecontinued three years, until her marriage gave her other occupations. In 1826, she started _The Juvenile Miscellany_, as already mentioned, said to be the first magazine expressly for children, in this country. In it, first appeared many of her charming stories afterward gatheredup in little volumes entitled, "Flowers for Children. "

In 1828, she was married to Mr. David Lee Child, then 34 years of age, eight years older than herself. Whittier describes him, as a young andable lawyer, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, and editor ofthe _Massachusetts Journal_. Mr. Child graduated at Harvard in 1817in the class with George Bancroft, Caleb Cushing, George B. Emerson, and Samuel J. May. Between 1818 and 1824, he was in our diplomaticservice abroad under Hon. Alexander Everett, at that time, Chargéd'Affaires in the Netherlands. On his return to America, Mr. Childstudied law in Watertown where, at the house of a mutual friend, hemet Miss Lydia Maria Francis. She herself reports this interestingevent under date of Dec. 2, 1824. "Mr. Child dined with us inWatertown. He possesses the rich fund of an intelligent traveller, without the slightest tinge of a traveller's vanity. Spoke of thetardy improvement of the useful arts in Spain and Italy. " Nearly twomonths pass, when we have this record: "Jan. 26, 1825. Saw Mr. Childat Mr. Curtis's. He is the most gallant man that has lived since thesixteenth century and needs nothing but helmet, shield, andchain-armor to make him a complete knight of chivalry. " Not all themeetings are recorded, for, some weeks later, "March 3, " we have thisentry, "One among the many delightful evenings spent with Mr. Child. Ido not know which to admire most, the vigor of his understanding orthe ready sparkle of his wit. "

There can be no doubt that she thoroughly enjoyed these interviews, and we shall have to discount the statement of any observer whogathered a different impression. Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, at whosehome some of these interviews took place, was a boy of twelve, and mayhave taken the play of wit between the parties too seriously. He says, "At first Miss Francis did not like Mr. Child. Their intercourse wasmostly banter and mutual criticism. Observers said, 'Those two peoplewill end in marrying. ' Miss Francis was not a beautiful girl in theordinary sense, but her complexion was good, her eyes were bright, hermouth expressive and her teeth fine. She had a great deal of wit, liked to use it, and did use it upon Mr. Child who was a frequentvisitor; but her deportment was always maidenly and lady-like. "

The engagement happened in this wise. Mr. Child had been admitted tothe bar and had opened an office in Boston. One evening about nineo'clock he rode out to Watertown on horseback and called at theCurtises' where Miss Francis then was. "My mother, who believed thedenouement had come, " says Mr. Curtis, "retired to her chamber. Mr. Child pressed his suit earnestly. Ten o'clock came, then eleven, thentwelve. The horse grew impatient and Mr. Child went out once or twiceto pacify him, and returned. At last, just as the clock was strikingone, he went. Miss Francis rushed into my mother's room and told hershe was engaged to Mr. Child. "

There are indications in this communication that Mr. Curtis did nothimself greatly admire Mr. Child and would not have married him, buthe concedes that, "Beyond all doubt, Mrs. Child was perfectly happy inher relations with him, through their long life. " After theirmarriage, he says, they went to housekeeping in a "very small house inBoston, " where Mr. Curtis, then a youth of sixteen, visited them andpartook of a simple, frugal dinner which the lady cooked and servedwith her own hands, and to which Mr. Child returned from his office, "cheery and breezy, " and we may hope the vivacity of the host may havemade up for the frugality of the entertainment. 

In "Letters from New York, " written to the Boston _Courier_, shespeaks tenderly of her Boston home which she calls "Cottage Place" anddeclares it the dearest spot on earth. I assume it was this "verysmall house" where she began her married life, where she dined thefastidious Mr. Curtis, and where she seems to have spent eight ornine happy years. Her marriage brought her great happiness. A friendsays, "The domestic happiness of Mr. And Mrs. Child seemed to meperfect. Their sympathies, their admiration of all things good, andtheir hearty hatred of all things mean and evil, were in entireunison. Mr. Child shared his wife's enthusiasms and was very proud ofher. Their affection, never paraded, was always manifest. " After Mr. Child's death, Mrs. Child said, "I believe a future life would be ofsmall value to me, if I were not united to him. "

Mr. Child was a man of fine intellect, with studious tastes andhabits, but there is too much reason to believe that his genius didnot lie in the management of practical life. Details of business wereapparently out of his sphere. "It was like cutting stones with arazor, " says one who knew him. "He was a visionary, " says another, "who always saw a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. " This was akind of defect which, though it cost her dear, Mrs. Child, of allpersons, could most easily forgive. One great success he achieved:that was in winning and keeping the heart of Mrs. Child. Their marriedlife seems to have been one long honeymoon. "I always depended, " shesays, "upon his richly stored mind, which was able and ready tofurnish needed information on any subject. He was my walkingdictionary of many languages, and my universal encyclopedia. In hisold age, he was as affectionate and devoted as when the lover of myyouth; nay, he manifested even more tenderness. He was often singing, 'There's nothing half so sweet in life As love's _old_ dream. '

Very often, when he passed me, he would lay his hand softly on my headand murmur 'Carum Caput. '. .. He never would see anything but thebright side of my character. He always insisted upon thinking thatwhatever I said was the wisest and whatever I did was the best. "

In the anti-slavery conflict, Mr. Child's name was among the earliest, and at the beginning of the controversy, few were more prominent. In1832, he published in Boston a series of articles upon slavery and theslave-trade; in 1836, another series upon the same subject, inPhiladelphia; in 1837, an elaborate memoir upon the subject for ananti-slavery society in France, and an able article in a _LondonReview_. It is said that the speeches of John Quincy Adams in Congresswere greatly indebted to the writings of Mr. Child, both for facts andarguments. 

Such, briefly, is the man with whom Mrs. Child is to spend forty-fiveyears of her useful and happy life. In 1829, the year after hermarriage, she put her twelve months of experience and reflection intoa book entitled, "The Frugal Housewife. " "No false pride, " she says, "or foolish ambition to appear as well as others, should induce aperson to live a cent beyond the income of which he is assured. " "Weshall never be free from embarrassment until we cease to be ashamed ofindustry and economy. " "The earlier children are taught to turn theirfaculties to some account the better for them and for their parents. ""A child of six years is old enough to be made useful and should betaught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has notbeen done to assist others. " We are told that a child can be taught tobraid straw for his hats or to make feather fans; the objection towhich would be that a modern mother would not let a child wear thatkind of hat nor carry the fan. 

The following will be interesting if not valuable: "Cheap as stockingsare, it is good economy to knit them; knit hose wear twice as long aswoven; and they can be done at odd moments of time which would not beotherwise employed. " What an age that must have been when one had timeenough and to spare! Other suggestions are quite as curious. The bookis "dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy. " "The writer, "she says, "has no apology to offer for this little book of economicalhints, except her deep conviction that such a book is needed. In thiscase, renown is out of the question; and ridicule is a matter ofindifference. "

Goethe made poems of his chagrins; Mrs. Child in this instanceutilized her privations and forced economies to make a book; and awonderfully successful book it was. She was not wrong in supposing itwould meet a want. During the next seven years, it went through twentyeditions, or three editions a year; in 1855, it had reached itsthirty-third edition, averaging little short of one edition a year forthirty-six years. Surely this was a result which made a year ofeconomical living in a "very small house" worth while. 

"The Frugal Housewife" was a true "mother's book, " although anotherand later volume was so named. "The Mother's Book" was nearly assuccessful as "The Frugal Housewife, " and went through eight Americaneditions, twelve English, and one German. The success of these booksgave Mrs. Child a good income, and she hardly needed to be the "frugalhousewife" she had been before. 

A check soon came to her prosperity. In 1831, she met Garrison and, being inflammable, caught fire from his anti-slavery zeal, and becameone of his earliest and staunchest disciples. The free use of theAthenĉum library which had been graciously extended to her ten yearsbefore, now enabled her to study the subject of slavery in all itsaspects, historical, legal, theoretical, and practical and, in 1833, she embodied the results of her investigations in a book entitled, "AnAppeal in behalf of the class of Americans called Africans. " Thematerial is chiefly drawn from Southern sources, the statute books ofSouthern states, the columns of Southern newspapers, and thestatements and opinions of Southern public men. It is an effectivebook to read even now when one is in a mood to rose-color the old-timeplantation life and doubtful whether anything could be worse than thepresent condition of the negro in the South. 

The book had two kinds of effect. It brought upon Mrs. Child theincontinent wrath of all persons who, for any reason, thought that theonly thing to do with slavery was to let it alone. "A lawyer, afterward attorney-general, " a description that fits Caleb Cushing, issaid to have used tongs to throw the obnoxious book out of the window;the Athenĉum withdrew from Mrs. Child the privileges of its library;former friends dropped her acquaintance; Boston society shut its doorsupon her; the sale of her books fell off; subscriptions to her_Juvenile Miscellany_ were discontinued; and the magazine died after asuccessful life of eight years; and Mrs. Child found that she hadventured upon a costly experiment. This consequence she hadanticipated and it had for her no terrors. "I am fully aware, " shesays in her preface, "of the unpopularity of the task I haveundertaken; but though I expect ridicule, I do not fear it. .. . Shouldit be the means of advancing even one single hour the inevitableprogress of truth and justice, I would not exchange the consciousnessfor all Rothschild's wealth or Sir Walter's fame. "

Of course a book of such evident significance and power would havehad another effect; by his own acknowledgement, it brought Dr. Channing into the anti-slavery crusade, and he published a book uponslavery in 1835; it led Dr. John G. Palfry, who had inherited aplantation in Louisiana, to emancipate his slaves; and, as he has morethan once said, it changed the course of Col. T. W. Higginson's lifeand made him an abolitionist. "As it was the first anti-slavery workever printed in America in book form, so, " says Col. Higginson, "Ihave always thought it the ablest. " Whittier says, "It is noexaggeration to say that no man or woman at that period rendered moresubstantial service to the cause of freedom, or made such a 'greatrenunciation' in doing it. "

Turning from the real world, which was becoming too hard for her, Mrs. Child took refuge in dreamland and wrote "Philothea: a story ofAncient Greece, " published in 1835. Critics have objected that thisdelightful romance is not an exact reproduction of Greek life, but isHamlet a reproduction of anything that ever happened in Denmark, orBrowning's Saul of anything that could have happened in Judea, athousand years before Christ? To Lowell, Mrs. Child was and remained"Philothea. " Higginson says that the lines in which Lowell describesher in the "Fable for Critics, " are the one passage of pure poetry itcontains, and at the same time the most charming sketch ever made ofMrs. Child. 

 "There comes Philothea, her face all aglow; She has just been dividing some poor creature's woe, And can't tell which pleases her most--to relieve His want, or his story to hear and believe. No doubt against many deep griefs she prevails, For her ear is the refuge of destitute tales; She knows well that silence is sorrow's best food, And that talking draws off from the heart its bad blood. "

In 1836, Mr. Child went abroad to study the Beet Sugar industry inFrance, Holland, and Germany and, after an absence of a year and ahalf, returned to engage in Beet Sugar Farming at Northampton, Mass. He received a silver medal for raw and refined sugar at the Exhibitionof the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association in 1839, and apremium of $100 from the Massachusetts Agricultural society the sameyear. He published a well written and edifying book upon "Beet Sugar, "giving the results of his investigations and experiments. It was anenterprise of great promise, but has taken half a century, in thiscountry, to become a profitable industry. 

Mrs. Child's letters from 1838 to 1841 are dated from Northampton, where she is assisting to work out the "Beet Sugar" experiment. Itwould have been a rather grinding experience to any one with lesscheerfulness than Mrs. Child. She writes, June 9, 1838, "A monthelapsed before I stepped into the woods which were all around meblooming with flowers. I did not go to Mr. Dwight's ordination, norhave I yet been to meeting. He has been to see me however, and thoughI left my work in the midst and sat down with a dirty gown and handssomewhat grimmed, we were high in the blue in fifteen minutes. " Mr. Dwight was Rev. John S. Dwight, Brook Farmer, and editor of _Dwight'sJournal of Music_. 

Half of her published letters are addressed to Mr. Or Mrs. Francis G. Shaw, parents of Col. Robert G. Shaw. Here is one in 1840, to Mr. Shaw, after she had made a trip to Boston. It will be interesting aspresenting a new aspect of Mrs. Child's nature: "The only thing, except meeting dear friends, that attracted me to Boston was theexhibition of statuary. .. . I am ashamed to say how deeply I am charmedwith sculpture: ashamed because it seems like affectation in one whohas had such limited opportunity to become acquainted with the arts. Ihave a little figure of a caryatid which acts upon my spirit like amagician's spell. .. . Many a time this hard summer, I have laid down mydish-cloth or broom and gone to refresh my spirit by gazing on it afew minutes. It speaks to me. It says glorious things. In summer Iplace flowers before it; and I have laid a garland of acorns andamaranths at its feet. I do love every little bit of real sculpture. "

Her other artistic passion was music, quite out of her reach at thisperiod; but happily, she loved birds and flowers, both of which a BeetSugar Farm in the Connecticut Valley made possible. A family ofswallows made their nest in her woodshed, husband and wife dividingthe labors of construction, nursing, and even of incubation, thoughthe male bird did not have the same skill and grace as the lady, inplacing his feet and wings. Mrs. Child gives a pretty account of thisincident in a letter to one of her little friends, and says, "It seemsas if I could watch them forever. " Later, in one of her letters tothe Boston _Courier_, she gives a more complete account of theepisode. Her observations convinced her that birds have to be taughtto fly, as a child is taught to walk. 

When birds and flowers went, she had the autumn foliage, and shemanaged to say a new thing about it: it is "color taking its fond andbright farewell of form--like the imagination giving a deeper, richer, and warmer glow to old familiar truths before the winter ofrationalism comes and places trunk and branches in naked outlineagainst the cold, clear sky. "

Whether she had been living hitherto in a "rent" we are not told, butin a letter of February 8, 1841, she informs us that she is about tomove to a farm on which "is a sort of a shanty with two rooms and agarret. We expect to whitewash it, build a new woodshed, and livethere next year. I shall keep no help, and there will be room forDavid and me. I intend to half bury it in flowers. "

There is nothing fascinating in sordid details, but Mrs. Child in themidst of sordid details, is glorious. A month before this last letter, her brother, Prof. Francis, had written her apparently wishing hermore congenial circumstances; we have only her reply, from which itappears her father is under her care. She declines her brother'ssympathy, and wonders that he can suppose "the deadening drudgery ofthe world" can imprison a soul in its caverns. "It is not merely aneloquent phrase, " she says, "but a distinct truth that the outward hasno power over us but that which we voluntarily give it. It is not Iwho drudge; it is merely the case that contains me. I defy all thepowers of earth and hell to make me scour floors and feed pigs, if Ichoose meanwhile to be off conversing with angels. .. . If I can inquietude and cheerfulness forego my own pleasures and relinquish mytastes, to administer to my father's daily comfort, I seem to thosewho live in shadows to be cooking food and mixing medicines, but I amin fact making divine works of art which will reveal to me their fairproportions in the far eternity. " Besides this consolation, she says, "Another means of keeping my soul fresh is my intense love of nature. Another help, perhaps stronger than either of the two, is domesticlove. "

Her Northampton life was nearer an end than she supposed when shewrote these letters; she did not spend the next year in the littlefarm house with "two rooms and a garret"; on May 27th, she dates aletter from New York city, where she has gone reluctantly to edit the_Anti-Slavery Standard_. She had been translated from the sphere of"cooking food and mixing medicines" to congenial literary occupations;she had, let us hope, a salary sufficient for her urgent necessities;her home was in the family of the eminent Quaker philanthropist, IsaacT. Hopper, who received her as a daughter, and whose kindness sherepaid by writing his biography. However the venture might come out, we would think her life could not well be harder or less attractivethan it had been, drudging in a dilapidated farm house, and we areglad she is well out of it. Strange to say, she did not take our viewof the situation. We have already seen how independent she was ofexternal circumstances. In a letter referred to, dated May 27, shechides a friend for writing accounts of her outward life: "What do Icare whether you live in one room or six? I want to know what yourspirit is doing. What are you thinking, feeling, and reading?. .. Mytask here is irksome enough. Your father will tell you that it was notzeal for the cause, but love for my husband, which brought me hither. But since it was necessary for me to leave home to be earningsomewhat, I am thankful that my work is for the anti-slavery cause. Ihave agreed to stay one year. I hope I shall then be able to return tomy husband and rural home, which is humble enough, yet verysatisfactory to me. Should the _Standard_ be continued, and my editinggenerally desired, perhaps I could make an arrangement to sendarticles from Northampton. At all events, I trust the weary separationfrom my husband is not to last more than a year. If I am to be awayfrom him, I could not be more happily situated than in Friend Hopper'sfamily. They treat me the same as a daughter and a sister. "

The _Anti-Slavery Standard_ was a new enterprise; its editorship wasoffered to Mr. And Mrs. Childs jointly; Col. Higginson says that Mr. Child declined because of ill health; another authority, that he wasstill infatuated with his Beet Sugar, of which Mrs. Child had had morethan enough; it appears from her letter that neither of them dreamedof abandoning the Sugar industry; if the enterprise was folly, theywere happily united in the folly. 

However, of the two, the _Anti-Slavery Standard_ was the moresuccessful enterprise, and at the end of the two years, Mr. Childclosed out his Beet Sugar business and joined Mrs. Child in editingthe paper. Mrs. Child edited the _Standard_ eight years, six of whichwere in conjunction with Mr. Child. They were successful editors; theygave the _Standard_ a high literary character, and made it acceptableto people of taste and culture who, whatever their sympathy withanti-slavery, were often repelled by the unpolished manners of Mr. Garrison's paper, _The Liberator_. 

Something of her life outside the _Standard_ office, something of thethings she saw and heard and enjoyed, during these eight years, can begathered from her occasional letters to the Boston _Courier_. They areinteresting still; they will always be of interest to one who cares toknow old New York, as it was sixty years ago, or from 1840 onward. That they were appreciated then is evident from the fact that, collected and published in two volumes in 1844, eleven editions werecalled for during the next eight years. Col. Higginson considers theseeight years in New York the most interesting and satisfactory of Mrs. Child's life. 

Though we have room for few incidents of this period, there is onetoo charming to be omitted. A friend went to a flower merchant onBroadway to buy a bunch of violets for Mrs. Child's birthday. Incidentally, the lady mentioned Mrs. Child; she may have ordered theflowers sent to her house. When the lady came to pay for them, theflorist said, "I cannot take pay for flowers intended for her. She isa stranger to me, but she has given my wife and children so manyflowers in her writings, that I will never take money of her. " Anotherpretty incident is this: an unknown friend or admirer always sent Mrs. Child the earliest wild flowers of spring and the latest in autumn. 

I have said that one of her passions was music, which happily she nowhas opportunities to gratify. "As for amusements, " she says, "music isthe only thing that excites me. .. . I have a chronic insanity withregard to music. It is the only Pegasus which now carries me far upinto the blue. Thank God for this blessing of mine. " I should be gladif I had room for her account of an evening under the weird spell ofOle Bull. Her moral sense was keener than her ĉsthetic, but herĉsthetic sense was for keener than that of the average mortal. Sometimes she felt, as Paul would have said, "in a strait betwixttwo"; in 1847 she writes Mr. Francis G. Shaw: "I am now wholly in thedispensation of art, and therefore theologians and reformers jar uponme. " Reformer as she was and will be remembered, she was easily drawninto the dispensation of art; and nature was always with her, so muchso that Col. Higginson says, "She always seemed to be talkingradicalism in a greenhouse. "

Mr. And Mrs. Child retired from the _Standard_ in 1849. Her nextletters are dated from Newton, Mass. Her father was living upon asmall place--a house and garden--in the neighboring town of Wayland, beautifully situated, facing Sudbury Hill, with the broad expanse ofthe river meadows between. Thither Mrs. Child went to take care of himfrom 1852 to 1856, when he died, leaving the charming little home toher. There are many traditions of her mode of life in Wayland, but herown account is the best: "In 1852, we made our humble home in Wayland, Mass. , where we spent twenty-two pleasant years, entirely alone, without any domestic, mutually serving each other and depending uponeach other for intellectual companionship. " If the memory of Waylandpeople is correct, Mr. Child was not with her much during the fouryears that her father lived. Her father was old and feeble and Mr. Child had not the serene patience of his wife. Life ran more easilywhen Mr. Child was away. Whatever other period in the life of Mrs. Child may have been the most satisfactory, this must have been themost trying. 

Under date of March 23, 1856, happily the last year of this sort ofwidowhood, she writes: "This winter has been the loneliest of my life. If you knew my situation you would pronounce it unendurable. I shouldhave thought so myself if I had had a foreshadowing of it a few yearsago. But the human mind can get acclimated to anything. What withconstant occupation and a happy consciousness of sustaining andcheering my poor old father in his descent to the grave, I am almostalways in a state of serene contentment. In summer, my onceextravagant love of beauty satisfies itself in watching the birds, theinsects, and the flowers in my little patch of a garden. " She has noroom for her vases, engravings, and other pretty things; she keepsthem in a chest, and she says, "when birds and flowers are gone, Isometimes take them out as a child does its playthings, and sit downin the sunshine with them, dreaming over them. "

We need not think of her spending much time dreaming over her littlehoard of artistic treasures. Her real business in this world iswriting the history of all religions, or "The Progress of ReligiousIdeas in Successive Ages. " It was a work begun in New York, as earlyas 1848, finished in Wayland in 1855, published in three large octavovolumes and, whatever its merits or success, was the greatest literarylabor of her life. 

Under date of July 14, 1848, she writes to Dr. Francis: "My book getsslowly on. .. . I am going to tell the plain, unvarnished truth, asclearly as I can understand it, and let Christians and Infidels, Orthodox and Unitarians, Catholics, Protestants, and Swedenborgiansgrowl as they like. They will growl if they notice it at all: for eachwill want his own theory favored, and the only thing I haveconscientiously aimed at is not to favor any theory at all. " She mayhave failed in scientific method; but here is a scientific spirit. "Inher religious speculations, " says Whittier, "Mrs. Child moved in thevery van. " In Wayland, she considered herself a parishioner of Dr. Edmund H. Sears, whom she calls, "our minister, " but she wassomewhat in advance of Dr. Sears. Her opinions were much nearer akinto those of Theodore Parker. Only a Unitarian of that type couldperhaps at this early period have conceived the history of religion asan evolution of one and the same spiritual element "through successiveages. "

She had not much time to dream over her chest of artistic treasureswhen the assault of Preston S. Brooks upon Senator Sumner called herto battle of such force and point that Dr. William H. Furness said, itwas worth having Sumner's head broken. 

When death released her from the care of her father, she took"Bleeding Kansas" under her charge. She writes letters to thenewspapers; she sits up till eleven o'clock, "stitching as fast as myfingers could go, " making garments for the Kansas immigrants; she"stirs up the Wayland women to make garments for Kansas"; she sendsoff Mr. Child to make speeches for Kansas; and then she writes him inthis manner: "How melancholy I felt when you went off in the morningdarkness. It seemed as if everything about me was tumbling down; as ifI were never to have a nest and a mate any more. " Surely the rest ofthis letter was not written for us to read: "Good, kind, magnanimoussoul, how I love you. How I long to say over the old prayer againevery night. It almost made me cry to see how carefully you hadarranged everything for my comfort before you went; so much kindlingstuff split up and the bricks piled up to protect my flowers. " Here islove in a cottage. This life is not all prosaic. 

Old anti-slavery friends came to see her and among them CharlesSumner, in 1857, spent a couple of hours with her, and left hisphotograph; she met Henry Wilson at the anti-slavery fair and talkedwith him an "hour or so. " Whittier says, "Men like Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Salmon P. Chase, and Governor Andrew availed themselvesof her foresight and sound judgment of men and measures. "

When John Brown was wounded and taken prisoner at Harper's Ferry, nothing was more in character for Mrs. Child than to offer herservices as his nurse. She wrote him under cover of a letter to Gov. Wise, of Virginia. The arrival of Mrs. Brown, made Mrs. Child'sattendance unnecessary, but the incident led to a livelycorrespondence between Mrs. Child and Gov. Wise, in which Mrs. Senator Mason, of Virginia, joined. Neither of her distinguishedcorrespondents possessed the literary skill of Mrs. Child. The entirecorrespondence was collected in a pamphlet of which 300, 000 copieswere sold. On a visit to Whittier at Amesbury, a delegation from aRepublican political meeting called upon her, saying they wanted tosee the woman who "poured hot shot into Gov. Wise. "

In 1863, after saying that she is "childish enough to talk to thepicture of a baby that is being washed, " she writes her friend, Mrs. Shaw, "But you must not suppose that I live for amusement. On thecontrary I work like a beaver the whole time. Just now I am making ahood for a poor neighbor; last week I was making flannels for thehospital; odd minutes are filled up ravelling lint; every string thatI can get sight of I pull for poor Sambo. I write to the _Tribune_about him; I write to the _Transcript_ about him; I write to privateindividuals about him; and I write to the President and members ofCongress about him; I write to Western Virginia and Missouri abouthim; and I get the articles published too. This shows what progressthe cause of freedom is making. " Not everything went to her mindhowever. If we think there has been a falling from grace in the publiclife of our generation, it may do us good to read what she says in1863: "This war has furnished many instances of individual nobility, but our national record is mean. "

In 1864, she published "Looking Toward Sunset, " a book designed to"present old people with something wholly cheerful. " The entireedition was exhausted during the holiday season; 4, 000 copies weresold and more called for. All her profits on the book, she devoted tothe freedmen, sending $400 as a first instalment. Not only that, butshe prepared a volume called "The Freedman's Book, " which she printedat an expense of $600, and distributed among the freedmen 1200 copiesat her own cost. She once sent Wendell Phillips a check of $100 forthe freedmen, and when he protested that it was more than she couldafford, she consented to "think it over. " The next day, she made hercontribution $200. She contributed $20 a year to the AmericanMissionary Association toward the support of a teacher for thefreedmen, and $50 a year to the Anti-Slavery Society. A lady wished, through Mr. Phillips, to give Mrs. Child several thousand dollars forher comfort. Mrs. Child declined the favor, but was persuaded toaccept it, and then scrupulously gave away the entire income incharity. It is evident she might have made herself very comfortable, if it had not given her so much more pleasure to make someone elsecomfortable. 

Her dress, as neat and clean as that of a Quakeress, was quite asplain and far from the latest style. A stranger meeting her in a stagecoach mistook her for a servant until she began to talk. "Who is thatwoman who dresses like a peasant, and speaks like a scholar?" he askedon leaving the coach. Naturally, it was thought Mrs. Child did notknow how to dress, or, more likely, did not care for pretty things. "You accuse me, " she writes to Miss Lucy Osgood, "you accuse me ofbeing indifferent to externals, whereas the common charge is that Ithink too much of beauty, and say too much about it. I myself think itone of my greatest weaknesses. A handsome man, woman or child canalways make a pack-horse of me. My next neighbor's little boy has mecompletely under his thumb, merely by virtue of his beautiful eyes andsweet voice. " There was one before her of whom it was said, "Hedenied himself, and took up his cross. " It was also said of him, "Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor. " He never had atruer disciple than Mrs. Child. 

Not that she ever talked of "crosses. " "But why use the wordsacrifice?" she asks. "I never was conscious of any sacrifice. " Whatshe gained in moral discipline or a new life, she says, was alwaysworth more than the cost. She used an envelope twice, Wendell Phillipssays; she never used a whole sheet of paper when half of one would do;she outdid poverty in her economies, and then gave money as if she hadthousands. "I seldom have a passing wish for enlarging my incomeexcept for the sake of doing more for others. My wants are very fewand simple. "

In 1867, Mrs. Child published "A Romance of the Republic, " a patheticstory, but fascinating, and admirably written; in 1878, appeared abook of choice selections, entitled, "Aspirations of the World"; andin 1871, a volume of short biographies, entitled "Good Wives, " anddedicated, to Mr. Child: "To my husband, this book is affectionatelyinscribed, by one who, through every vicissitude, has found in hiskindness and worth, her purest happiness and most constant incentiveto duty. "

Mr. Child died in 1874 at the age of eighty, and Mrs. Child followedhim in 1880, at the age of seventy-eight. After her death, a smallvolume of her letters was published, of which the reader will wishthere were more. Less than a month before her death, she wrote to afriend a list of benevolent enterprises she has in mind and says, "Oh, it is such a luxury to be able to give without being afraid. I try notto be Quixotic, but I want to rain down blessings on all the world, intoken of thankfulness for the blessings that have been rained downupon me. "

It is too late to make amends for omissions in this paper, but itwould be unjust to Mrs. Child to forget her life-long devotion to theinterests of her own sex. In 1832, a year before her "Appeal in behalfof that class of Americans called Africans, "--eleven years before theappearance of Margaret Fuller's "Woman in the Nineteenth Century, "Mrs. Child published "A History of the Condition of Women in all agesand nations, " showing her disposition to begin every inquiry with asurvey of the facts, and also that the "woman question" was the firstto awaken her interest. Her greatest contribution to the advancementof women was herself; that is, her own achievements. To the samepurpose were her biographies of famous women: "Memoirs of Mme. DeStael and Mme. Roland" in 1847, and sketches of "Good Wives" in 1871. Whittier says, she always believed in woman's right to the ballot, ascertainly he did, calling it "the greatest social reform of the age. "In one letter to Senator Sumner, she directly argues the question: "Ireduce the argument, " she says, "to very simple elements. I pay taxesfor property of my own earning, and I do not believe in 'taxationwithout representation. '" Again: "I am a human being and every humanbeing has a right to a voice in the laws which claim authority to taxhim, to imprison him, or to _hang_ him. "

A light humor illuminates this argument. Humor was one of her savingqualities which, as Whittier says, "kept her philanthropy free fromany taint of fanaticism. " It contributed greatly to her cheerfulness. Of her fame, she says playfully: "In a literary point of view I know Ihave only a local reputation, done in water colors. "

Could anything have been better said than this of the New EnglandApril or even May: "What a misnomer in our climate to call thisseason Spring, very much like calling Calvinism religion. " Nothingcould have been keener than certain points scored in her reply to Mrs. Senator Mason. Mrs. Mason, remembering with approving conscience herown ministries in the slave cabins caring for poor mothers with youngbabies, asks Mrs. Child, in triumph, if she goes among the poor torender such services. Mrs. Child replies that she has never knownmothers under such circumstances to be neglected, "and here at theNorth, " said she, "after we have helped the mothers, we do not sellthe babies. " After Gen. Grant's election to the Presidency, aprocession with a band from Boston, marched to her house and gave hera serenade. She says that she joined in the hurrahs "like thestrong-minded woman that I am. The fact is, I forgot half the timewhether I belonged to the stronger or weaker sex. " Whether shebelonged to the stronger or weaker sex, is still something of aproblem. Sensible men would be willing to receive her, should womenever refuse to acknowledge her. 

Wendell Phillips paid her an appreciative tribute, at her funeral. "There were, " he said, "all the charms and graceful elements which wecall feminine, united with a masculine grasp and vigor; soundjudgment and great breadth; large common sense and capacity foreveryday usefulness, endurance, foresight, strength, and skill. " Theaddress is given in full in the volume of "Letters. " There is also afine poem by Whittier for the same occasion:

 "Than thine was never turned a fonder heart To nature and to art;

 Yet loving beauty, thou couldst pass it by, And for the poor deny Thyself. .. . "

The volume contains a poetical tribute of an earlier date, by ElizaScudder, of which Mrs. Child said, "I never was so touched and pleasedby any tribute in my life. I cried over the verses and I smiled overthem. " I will close this paper with Miss Scudder's last stanza:

 "So apt to know, so wise to guide, So tender to redress, -- O, friend with whom such charms abide, How can I love thee less?"

IV

DOROTHEA LYNDE DIX

[Illustration: DOROTHEA LYNDE DIX]

The career of Dorothy Dix is a romance of philanthropy which the worldcan ill afford to forget. It has been said of her, and it is stillsaid, that she was "the most useful and distinguished woman Americahas yet produced. " It is the opinion of Mr. Tiffany, her biographer, that as the founder of institutions of mercy, she "has simply no peerin the annals of Protestantism. " To find her parallel one must go tothe calendar of the Catholic saints, --St. Theresa, of Spain, or SantaChiara, of Assisi. "Why then, " he asks, do the "majority of thepresent generation know little or nothing of so remarkable a story!"Till his biography appeared, it might have been answered that thestory had never been told; now, we should have to say that, with athousand demands upon our time, it has not been read. 

Dorothea Lynde Dix--born February 11, 1802--was the daughter of JosephDix and granddaughter of the more eminent Dr. Elijah Dix, ofWorcester, later of Boston, Mass. Dr. Dix was born in Watertown, Mass. , in 1747. At the age of seventeen, he became the office boy ofDr. John Green, an eminent physician in Worcester, Mass. , and later, astudent of medicine. After five years, in 1770, he began to practiceas physician and surgeon in Worcester where he formed a partnershipwith Dr. Sylvester Gardner. It must have been a favorable time foryoung doctors since in 1771, a year after he began to practice, hemarried Dorothy Lynde, of Charlestown, Mass. , for whom her littlegranddaughter was named. Mrs. Dix seems to have been a woman of greatdecision of character, and no less precision of thought and action, two traits which reappeared conspicuously in our great philanthropist. 

Certain qualities of Dr. Dix are also said to have reappeared in hisgranddaughter. He was self-reliant, aggressive, uncompromising, public-spirited, and sturdily honest. To his enterprise, Worcesterowed its first shade trees, planted by him, when shade trees wereconsidered great folly, and also the Boston and Worcester turnpike, when mud roads were thought to be divinely appointed thoroughfares. His integrity is shown by an incident which also throws light uponthe conditions of a troubled period. His partner, Dr. Gardner, madethe grave mistake of taking the royal side in the controversies thatpreceded the Revolution, and Worcester became as hot for him asRichmond or Charleston was for a Union man in 1861. Dr. Gardnerdisappeared, leaving his effects behind him. After the war, Dr. Dixmade a voyage to England and honorably settled accounts with hisformer partner. 

It was like the enterprising Dr. Dix that he turned this creditableact to his financial advantage. On his return to America he broughtwith him a stock of medical books, surgical instruments, and chemicalapparatus, and became a dealer in physician's supplies, whilecontinuing the practice of his profession. His business prospering, in1795 he removed to Boston for a larger field, where he opened a drugstore near Faneuil Hall and established chemical works in SouthBoston. Successful as physician, druggist and manufacturer, he soonhad money to invest. Maine, with its timber lands, was the Eldorado ofthat era, and Dr. Dix bought thousands of acres in its wilderness, where Dixfield in the west, and Dixmont in the east, townships onceowned by him, preserve his name and memory. 

The house of Dr. Dix in Boston, called the "Dix Mansion, " was onWashington St. , corner of Dix Place, then Orange Court. It had a largegarden behind it, where originated the Dix pear, once a favorite. Dr. Dix died in 1809, when Dorothea was seven years old. Young as she was, he was among the most vivid of her childhood memories and by far thepleasantest. She seems to have been a favorite with him and it was hisdelight to take her in his chaise on his rounds, talking playfullywith her and listening to her childish prattle. 

Joseph Dix, the father of Dorothea, is a vague and shadowy memory. Heseems to have had little of his father's energy or good sense. Unstable in many of his ways, he lived a migratory life, "at variousspots in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, as well as in Worcesterand Boston, Mass. " When Dorothea was born, he was living at Hampden, Maine, adjoining his father's Dixmont properties, presumably as hisfather's land agent. He probably tired of this occupation because itinterfered with his business. His business seems to have beenreligion. He was a prolific author of religious literature. He was aphilanthropist after his kind, giving his time without stint to thewriting of religious tracts, and spending his money in publishingthem, with little benefit to the world and much detriment to hisfamily. In the stitching and pasting of these tracts, the wholehousehold were required to assist and it was against this irksometaskwork that Dorothea, at the age of twelve, rebelled, running awayfrom Worcester, where the family then lived, and finding a refuge withher grandmother in Boston. Dorothea afterwards educated her twobrothers, one of whom became a sea captain and the other a Bostonmerchant. 

Dorothea Dix was created by her Maker, but she was given in a plasticstate, first into the hands of inexorable Madam Dix, and next intothose of the all-pitying Dr. Channing. Madam Dix is described as afine specimen of the dignified, precise, conscientious New Englandgentlewoman of her generation. Industry, economy, and above allthoroughness were the chief articles of her religion, and sheinstilled these virtues into the mind of her granddaughter by the mostvigorous discipline. A week of solitary confinement was among thepenalties inflicted upon the hapless child who had failed to reachthe standard of duty prescribed for her. The standard, with Madam Dix, did not differ from perfection discernibly. Mr. Tiffany quotes a ladywho in her girlhood, as a special reward of merit, was allowed to makean entire shirt under the supervision of Madam Dix. It was anexperience never forgotten. No stitch in the entire garment could beallowed to differ perceptibly from every other, but the lady spoke ofthe ordeal with enthusiastic gratitude, declaring that it had been alife-long benefit to her to have been compelled to do one piece ofwork thoroughly well. 

"I never knew childhood, " Miss Dix said pitifully in after life. Certainly with this exacting grandmother, there can be no childhood asit is understood to-day; but if Dorothea submits to the rigorousdiscipline enforced upon her, she will make a woman of iron fibre whowill flinch from no hardship and will leave no task undone. Happilyshe did submit to it. The alternative would have been to return to herhalf-vagabond father. Too much discipline or too little was herdestiny. She preferred to take the medicine in excess, and in the endwas grateful for it. 

Dorothea was so apt a pupil and so ambitious that, at the age offourteen, she returned to Worcester and opened a school for smallchildren, prudently lengthening the skirts and sleeves of her dress togive dignity and impressiveness to her appearance. Half a centurylater one of these pupils vividly recalled the child-teacher, tall ofher age, easily blushing, at once beautiful and imposing in manner, but inexorably strict in discipline. 

Dorothea spent the next four years in Boston in preparation for a moreambitious undertaking and, in 1821 at the age of nineteen, she openeda day school in Boston in a small house belonging to Madam Dix. Theschool prospered and gradually expanded into a day and boardingschool, for which the Dix mansion, whither the school was removed, furnished convenient space. Madam Dix, enfeebled by age andinfirmities, laid down the scepter she had wielded, and the premisespassed virtually into the hands of Dorothea. Thither came pupils from"the most prominent families in Boston" and other Massachusetts towns, and even from beyond the limits of the State. There also she broughther brothers to be educated under her care and started upon a businesscareer. 

Hardly had she started her school for the rich and fortunate before, anticipating her vocation as a philanthropist, she opened another forthe poor and destitute. A letter is preserved in which she pleadinglyasks the conscientious but perhaps stony Madam Dix for the loft overthe stable for this purpose. "My dear grandmother, " she begins, "Had Ithe saint-like eloquence of our minister, I would employ it inexplaining all the motives, and dwelling on the good, the good to thepoor, the miserable, the idle, the ignorant, which would follow yourgiving me permission to use the barn chamber for a school-room forcharitable and religious purposes. "

The minister with saint-like eloquence was Dr. Channing. The letter isvaluable as showing the source of the flame that had fired herphilanthropic soul. For the finer culture of the heart she had passedfrom the hands of Madam Dix to those of Dr. Channing. The request forthe room was granted and Mr. Tiffany tells us that "The littlebarn-school proved the nucleus out of which years later was developedthe beneficent work of the Warren Street Chapel, from which as acentre spread far and wide a new ideal of dealing with childhood. There first was interest excited in the mind of Rev. Charles Barnard, a man of positive spiritual genius in charming and uplifting thechildren of the poor and debased. "

Letters from Miss Dix at this period show that she had a sensitivenature, easily wrought upon, now inflamed to action and now melted totears. "You say that I weep easily. I was early taught to sorrow, toshed tears, and now, when sudden joy lights up or unexpected sorrowstrikes my heart, I find it difficult to repress the full and swellingtide of feeling. " She is reading a book of poems and weeping overit, --"paying my watery tribute to the genius" of the poet. She longsfor similar talents that she "might revel in the luxury of thosemental visions that must hourly entrance a spirit that partakes lessof earth than heaven. " It will be remembered that her father wasreligious even to folly. Here was his child, only by judicioustraining, the stream was turned into channels of wise beneficence. 

With the management of two schools, the supervision of the household, the care of two younger brothers, and ministries to her grandmotheralready advanced in years, Miss Dix was sufficiently occupied, but shefound time to prepare a text-book upon "Common Things, " gathering thematerial as she wrote. This, her first attempt at book-making, issuedin 1824, was kept in print forty-five years, and went to its sixtiethedition in 1869. It was followed the next year by "Hymns for Children"selected and altered, and by a book of devotions entitled, "EveningHours. " Lengthening the day at both ends, "rising before the sun andgoing to bed after midnight, " working while others slept, gave timefor these extra tasks. Nature exacted her usual penalties. In thethird year of this arduous labor, threatenings of lung troublesappeared which, however, she defied even when "in conducting herclasses she had to stand with one hand on a desk for support, and theother pressed hard to her side as though to repress a hard pain. "Meanwhile she wrote a bosom friend: "There is in our nature adisposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, whichunless hourly combated will overcome the best faculties of our mindsand paralyse our most useful powers. .. . I have often entertained adread lest I should fall a victim to my besieger, and that fear hassaved me thus far. "

Besides the terror of lapsing into self-indulgence, she wasstimulated to activity by the care of her brothers, for one of whomshe seems to have felt special anxiety: "Oh, Annie, " she writes, "ifthat child is good, I care not how humble his pathway in life. It isfor him my soul is filled with bitterness when sickness wastes me; itis because of him I dread to die. " Was there no one to advise her thatthe best care of her brother would be to care for herself, and that ifshe would do more, she must first do less! Where was Dr. Channing who, more than any other, was responsible for her intemperate zeal! Itappears that Dr. Channing, "not without solicitude, " as he writes her, was watching over his eager disciple. "Your infirm health, " he says, "seems to darken your prospect of usefulness. But I believe yourconstitution will yet be built up, if you will give it a fair chance. You must learn to give up your plans of usefulness as much as those ofgratification, to the will of God. "

Miss Dix abandoned her school apparently in 1827, after six years ofservice and at the age of twenty-five. The following spring and summershe spent as a governess in the family of Dr. Channing at his summerhome in Rhode Island. Her duties were light and she lived much in theopen air, devoting her leisure to botany in which she was already "nomean proficient, " and to "the marine life of the beautiful region. "Very pretty letters were exchanged between her and Dr. Channing at thetermination of the engagement. "We will hear no more of thanks, " hewrote her, "but your affection for us and our little ones we willtreasure among our most precious blessings. " He invites her to renewthe relations another year, and so she did. 

To avoid the rigors of a New England climate, Miss Dix, for someyears, spent her winters, now in Philadelphia, now in Alexandria, Va. , keeping herself busy with reading "of a very multifariouskind, --poetry, science, biography, and travels, --besides eking out thescanty means she had laid by from her teaching by writing stories andcompiling floral albums and books of devotion. " In 1827, she publisheda volume of "Ten Short Stories for Children" which went to a secondedition in 1832; in 1828, "Meditations for Private Hours, " which wentthrough several editions; in 1829, two little books, "The Garland ofFlora, " and "The Pearl, a Christmas Gift. " Occasional briefengagements in teaching are also recorded in this period. 

The winter of 1830, she spent with the Channings on the Island of St. Croix, in the West Indies, in her old capacity as governess. Adaughter of Dr. Channing gives an interesting account of thepreceptress of whom, first and last, she had seen so much. Shedescribes Miss Dix as tall and dignified, very shy in manner, strictand inflexible in discipline. "From her iron will, it was hopeless toappeal. I think she was a very accomplished teacher, active anddiligent herself, very fond of natural history and botany. She enjoyedlong rambles, always calling our attention to what was interesting inthe world around us. I hear that some of her pupils speak of her asirascible. I have no such remembrance. Fixed as fate we consideredher. "

Miss Dix returned from the West Indies in the spring, very muchimproved in health, and in the autumn, she reopened her school in theDix Mansion, with the same high ideals as before and with suchimproved methods as experience had suggested. Pupils came to her againas of old and she soon had as many attendants as her space permitted. A feature of the school was a letter-box through which passed a dailymail between teacher and pupils and "large bundles of child-letters ofthis period" are still extant, preserved by Miss Dix with scrupulouscare to the end of life. It was a bright child who wrote as follows:"I thought I was doing well until I read your letter, but when yousaid that you were rousing to greater energy, all my satisfactionvanished. For if you are not satisfied in some measure with yourselfand are going to do more than you have done, I don't know what I shalldo. You do not go to rest until midnight and then you rise veryearly. " The physician had administered too strong a tonic for thelittle patient's health. 

A lady who, at the age of sixteen, attended this school in 1833, writes of her eminent teacher as follows: "She fascinated me from thefirst, as she had done many of my class before me. Next to my mother, I thought her the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was in theprime of her years, tall and of dignified carriage, head finely shapedand set, with an abundance of soft, wavy, brown hair. " The schoolcontinued in the full tide of success for five years, during whichtime, by hard labor and close economies, Miss Dix had saved enough tosecure her "the independence of a modest competence. " This seems agreat achievement, but if one spends nothing for superfluities anddoes most of his labor himself, he can lay by his income, much orlittle. The appointments of the school are said to have been verysimple, a long table serving as a desk for study, when it was not inuse for dinner. Only one assistant is mentioned, who gave instructionin French and, perhaps, elementary Latin. Surely Miss Dix could handlethe rest herself. The merit of the school was not in its elaborateappointments, but in the personal supervision of its accomplishedmistress. So the miracle was wrought and at the age of thirty-three, Miss Dix had achieved a modest competence. 

The undertaking had cost her her health once before, and now it costher her health again. The old symptoms, a troublesome cough, pain inthe side, and slight hemorrhages, returned and, having dragged herfrail body through the winter of 1836, Miss Dix reluctantly closed herschool in the spring and, in obedience to her physician, went toEurope for rest, with the intention of spending the summer in England, the autumn in France, and the winter in Italy. Prostrated by thevoyage, she was carried to a hotel in Liverpool where she was put tobed with the forlorn prospect of being confined to her solitary roomfor an indefinite period of convalescence. But again Dr. Channingbefriended her. From him she had received letters of introduction, oneof which brought to her side Mr. William Rathbone, a wealthy merchantof Liverpool and a prominent English Unitarian. Mr. And Mrs. Rathboneinsisted upon taking her to their home, a charming residence a fewmiles out of the city. Thither she consented to go for a visit of afew weeks, and there she remained, as an honored guest tenderly caredfor, for eighteen months. "To the end of her days, " says herbiographer, "this period of eighteen months stood out in her memory asthe jubilee of her life, the sunniest, the most restful, and thetenderest to her affections of her whole earthly experience. " Shewrote a Boston friend, "You must imagine me surrounded by everycomfort, sustained by every tenderness that can cheer, blest in thecontinual kindness of the family in which Providence has placed me, --Iwith no claim but those of a common nature. " And again, "So completelyam I adopted into the circle of loving spirits that I sometimesforget I really am not to consider the bonds transient in theirbinding. "

She very much needed these friends and their tender care. Nine monthsafter her arrival, we hear of occasional hemorrhages from which shehas been exempt for ten days, the pain in her side less acute, and herphysician has given her permission to walk about her room. One wouldthink that her career was practically ended, but, strange to say, thecareer which was to make her famous had not yet begun. From this date, her convalescence proceeded steadily, and she was able to enjoy muchin the delightful home and refined social circle in which she foundherself. "Your remark, " she writes a friend, "that I probably enjoymore now in social intercourse than I have ever before done is quitetrue. Certainly if I do not improve, it will be through wilfulself-neglect. " Apparently, she was having a glimpse of a less prosaicexistence than the grinding routine of a boarding school. Madam Dixdied at the age of ninety-one, leaving her granddaughter, still inEurope, a substantial legacy, which sensibly increased her limitedresources and, when the time came for action, left her free to carryout her great schemes of benevolence without hampering personalanxieties. It ought to preserve the memory of Madam Dix that sheendowed a great philanthropist. 

In the autumn of 1837, Miss Dix returned to America, and avoiding theNew England climate, spent the winter in Washington, D. C. , and itsneighborhood. Apparently, it was not a wholly happy winter, chieflybecause of her vain and tender longings for the paradise she had leftacross the sea. The Washington of 1837 seemed raw to her after thecultivated English home she had discovered. "I was not conscious, " shewrites a friend, "that so great a trial was to meet my return fromEngland till the whole force of the contrast was laid before me. .. . Imay be too craving of that rich gift, the power of sharing with otherminds. I have drunk deeply, long, and Oh, how blissfully, at thisfountain in a foreign clime. Hearts met hearts, minds joined withminds, and what were the secondary trials of pain to the enfeebledbody when daily was administered the soul's medicine and food. "Surely, that English experience was one upon which not every invalidfrom these shores could count, but when, a few years later, Miss Dixreturned to England as a kind of angel of mercy, giving back muchmore than she had ever received, the Rathbone family must have beenglad that they had befriended her in her obscurity and her need. 

It was in 1841 at the age of thirty-nine that the second chapter inthe life of Miss Dix began. Note that she had as little thought thatshe was beginning a great career as any one of us that he will dateall his future from something he has done or experienced to-day. Ithappened that Dr. J. T. G. Nichols, so long the beloved pastor of theUnitarian parish in Saco, Maine, was then a student of Divinity atCambridge. He had engaged to assist in a Sunday School in the EastCambridge jail, and all the women, twenty in number, had been assignedto him. The experience of one session with his class was enough toconvince him that a young man was very much out of place in thatposition and that a woman, sensible if possible, but a womancertainly, was necessary. His mother advised him to consult Miss Dix. Not that her health would permit her to take the class, but she couldadvise. On hearing Mr. Nichols' statement, Miss Dix deliberated amoment and then said, "I will take the class myself. " Mr. Nicholsprotested that this was not to be thought of, in the condition of herhealth, but we have heard of her iron will: "Fixed as fate weconsidered her, " said one of her pupils; and she answered Mr. Nichols, "I shall be there next Sunday. "

This was the beginning. "After the school was over, " says Dr. Nichols, "Miss Dix went into the jail and found among the prisoners a fewinsane persons with whom she talked. She noticed that there was nostove in their rooms and no means of proper warmth. " The date was thetwenty-eighth of March and the climate was New England, from whichMiss Dix had so often had to flee. "The jailer said that a fire forthem was not needed, and would be unsafe. Her repeated solicitationswere without success. " The jailer must have thought he was dealingwith a woman, not with destiny. "At that time the court was in sessionat East Cambridge, and she caused the case to be brought before it. Her request was granted. The cold rooms were warmed. Thus was hergreat work commenced. "

Such is Dr. Nichols' brief statement, but the course of events did notrun so smoothly as we are led to suppose. The case had to be foughtthrough the newspapers as well as the court, and here Miss Dix showedthe generalship which she exhibited on many another hard foughtfield. She never went into battle single-handed. She always managed tohave at her side the best gunners when the real battle began. In theEast Cambridge skirmish, she had Rev. Robert C. Waterston, Dr. SamuelG. Howe, and Charles Sumner. Dr. Howe visited the jail and wrote anaccount for the Boston _Advertiser_. When this statement was disputed, as it was, Mr. Sumner, who had accompanied Dr. Howe, confirmed hisaccount and added details of his own. He said that the inmates "werecramped together in rooms poorly ventilated and noisome with filth;"that "in two cages or pens constructed of plank, within the four stonewalls of the same room" were confined, and had been for months, araving maniac and an interesting young woman whose mind was soslightly obscured that it seemed any moment as if the cloud would passaway; that "the whole prison echoed with the blasphemies of the poorold woman, while her young and gentle fellow in suffering seemed toshrink from her words as from blows;" that the situation was hardlyless horrid than that of "tying the living to the dead. "

Where was Miss Dix during this controversy? Why, she was preparing toinvestigate every jail and almshouse in the State of Massachusetts. If this was the way the insane were treated in the city of Cambridge, in a community distinguished for enlightenment and humanity, whatmight not be going on in more backward and less favored localities?Note-book in hand, going from city to city and from town to town, MissDix devoted the two following years to answering this questionexhaustively. 

Having gathered her facts, she presented them to the Legislature in aMemorial of thirty-two octavo pages, the first of a series ofseventeen statements and appeals presented to the legislatures ofdifferent states, as far west as Illinois and as far south asLouisiana. "I shall be obliged, " she said, "to speak with greatplainness and to reveal many things revolting to the taste, and fromwhich my woman's nature shrinks with peculiar sensitiveness. .. . Iproceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the presentstate of insane persons within this Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens, chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashedinto obedience. .. . I give a few illustrations but description fadesbefore reality. " If we could dismiss the subject by saying she reportsinstance after instance where men and women were confined in thealmshouses in Massachusetts in such conditions of inhumanity andneglect as no intelligent farmer would tolerate for his swine, wecould avoid some unpleasant details; but the statement would beineffective because it would seem incredible. At the almshouse inDanvers, confined in a remote, low, outbuilding, she found a youngwoman, once respectable, industrious and worthy, whose mind had beenderanged by disappointments and trials. "There she stood, " says MissDix, "clinging to or beating upon the bars of her caged apartment, thecontracted size of which afforded space only for increasingaccumulations of filth, --a foul spectacle; there she stood, with nakedarms, dishevelled hair, the unwashed frame invested with fragments ofunclean garments, the air so extremely offensive, though ventilationwas afforded on all sides but one, that it was not possible to remainbeyond a few moments without retreating for recovery to the outwardair. Irritation of body, produced by utter filth and exposure, incitedher to the horrid process of tearing off her skin by inches; her neckand person were thus disfigured to hideousness. .. . And who protectsher, " Miss Dix suggestively asks, "who protects her, --that worse thanPariah outcast, --from other wrongs and blacker outrages!" Thisquestion had more meaning for Miss Dix than we might suppose, for atthe almshouse in Worcester she had found an insane Madonna and herbabe: father unknown. 

Fair and beautiful Newton finds a place in this chapter of dishonor, with a woman chained, nearly nude, and filthy beyond measure: "Sick, horror-struck, and almost incapable of retreating, I gained theoutward air. " A case in Groton attained infamous celebrity, notbecause the shame was without parallel but because the overseers ofthe poor tried to discredit the statements of Miss Dix. The fact wasthat she had understated the case. Dr. Bell of the McLean Asylum, confirmed her report and added details. In an outbuilding at thealmshouse, a young man, slightly deranged but entirely inoffensive, was confined by a heavy iron collar to which was attached a chain sixfeet in length, the limit of his possible movements. His hands werefastened together by heavy clavises secured by iron bolts. There wasno window in his dungeon, but for ventilation there was an opening, half the size of a sash, closed in cold weather by a board shutter. From this cell, he had been taken to the McLean Asylum, where hisirons had been knocked off, his swollen limbs chafed gently, andfinding himself comfortable, he exclaimed, "My good man, I must kissyou. " He showed no violence, ate at the common table, slept in thecommon bedroom, and seemed in a fair way to recovery when, to save theexpense of three dollars a week for his board and care, the thriftyGroton officials took him away. He could be boarded at the almshousefor nothing, and, chained in an outbuilding, he would not require anycare. 

We can follow Miss Dix in her career through a dozen states of thisUnion, into the British Provinces, to Scotland and England, thenceacross to the Continent, without repeating these details, if we bearin mind that such as we have seen was the condition of the pauperinsane at that period. Her memorial was presented by Dr. S. G. Howe, then happily a member of the Legislature, and a bill was passed, notwithout opposition, but finally passed, enlarging the asylum atWorcester to accommodate two hundred additional patients. Theprovision was inadequate, but a reform of old abuses had begun. It washer first victory. 

Grateful for what had been accomplished in Massachusetts, Miss Dixturned to Rhode Island, whose borders she had often approached andsometimes crossed in her investigations in the adjoining state. RhodeIsland was perhaps not less civilized than her neighbor, but RhodeIsland furnished the prize case of horrors in the mistreatment ofinsanity, a case which in a letter introducing the discoverer, Mr. Thomas G. Hazard said went beyond anything he supposed to exist in thecivilized world. The case was this: Abraham Simmons, a man whose nameought to go on the roll of martyrdom, was confined in the town ofLittle Compton, in a cell seven feet square, stone-built, stone-roofed, and stone-floored, the entrance double-walled, double-doored and double-locked, "excluding both light and fresh air, and without accommodation of any description for warming andventilation. " When this dungeon was discovered, the walls were coveredby frost a half inch in thickness; the bed was provided with twocomfortables, both wet and the outer one stiffly frozen, or, as MissDix puts it, "only wet straw to lie upon and a sheet of ice for hiscovering. " Lest two locks should not be enough to hold this dangerousman, his leg was tethered to the stone floor by an ox-chain. "Myhusband, " said the mistress, "in winter, sometimes of a morning rakesout half a bushel of frost, _and yet he never freezes_; sometimes hescreams dreadfully and that is the reason we had the double wall andtwo doors in place of one; his cries disturb us in the house. " "Howlong has he been here?" "Oh, above three years. " Nothing in thetraditions of the Bastile could exceed these horrors, and yet theywere not the product of intentional cruelty, but of unfathomablestupidity. 

Disregarding the well-meant warnings of her attendant that he wouldkill her, Miss Dix took his hands, tried to warm them in her own, spoke to him of liberty, care and kindness, and for answer "a tearstole over his hollow cheeks, but no words answered my importunities. "Her next step was to publish the terrible story in the ProvidenceJournal, not with a shriek, as might have been expected and justified, but with the affected coolness of a naturalist. With grim humor, sheheaded her article, "Astonishing Tenacity of Life, " as if it had onlya scientific interest for anybody. If you doubted the statements, youmight go and see for yourself: "Should any persons in thisphilanthropic age be disposed from motives of curiosity to visit theplace, they may rest assured that travelling is considered quite safein that part of the country, however improbable it may seem. Thepeople of that region profess the Christian religion, and it is evensaid that they have adopted some forms and ceremonies which they callworship. It is not probable, however, that they address themselves topoor Simmons' God. " Their prayers and his shrieks would make a strangediscord, she thinks, if they entered the ear of the same deity. 

Having reported her discoveries to the men of science, she nextappealed to the men of wealth. Providence had at that date amulti-millionaire, by the name of Butler; he left four millions to hisheirs. He had never been known as a philanthropist; he did not himselfsuppose that his heart was susceptible. It is said that knowingpersons smiled when they heard that Miss Dix intended to appeal tohim. Further, it is said that Mr. Butler, at the interview, ingeniously diverted the conversation from topics that threatened tobe serious. He apparently had no thought of giving Miss Dix a penny. At length she rose with the impressive dignity so often noted by herpupils and said: "Mr. Butler, I wish you to hear what I have to say. Iwant to bring before you certain facts involving terrible sufferingto your fellow creatures all around you, --suffering you can relieve. My duty will end when I have done this, and with you will rest allfurther responsibility. " Mr. Butler heard her respectfully to the end, and then asked, "What do you want me to do?" "Sir, " she said, "I wantyou to give $50, 000 toward the enlargement of the insane hospital inthis city. " "Madam, I'll do it, " he said, and much more of his estateafterward went the same way. 

Three years of devoted study of the problems of insanity, withlimitless opportunities for personal observation, had given Miss Dixan expert knowledge of the subject. She had conceived what an insaneasylum should be. Hitherto, she had been content to enlarge uponfoundations already laid; now she would build an asylum herself. Shesaw, we are told, that such an institution as she conceived could notbe built by private benevolence, but must have behind it a legislativeappropriation. She chose New Jersey as the field of her experiment. Quietly, she entered the state and canvassed its jails and almshouses, as she had those of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Next she digestedher facts in a Memorial to the Legislature. Then, with a politicalshrewdness for which she became celebrated, she selected the member, uniting a good heart with a clear head and persistent will, into whosehands it should be placed. Much of her success is said to have beendue to her political sagacity. The superintendent of one of herasylums said, "She had an insight into character that was trulymarvellous; and I have never known anyone, man or woman, who bore moredistinctly the mark of intellectuality. " Having placed her Memorial inthe hands of a skilful tactician, she retired to a room appropriatedto her use by the courtesy of the House, where she spent her timewriting editorials for newspapers, answering the questions of members, and holding receptions. "You cannot imagine, " she writes a friend, "the labor of conversing and convincing. Some evenings I had at oncetwenty gentlemen for three hours' steady conversation. " After acampaign of two months the bill establishing the New Jersey StateLunatic Asylum was passed, and the necessary money appropriated forits erection. She was always partial to this first creation of herenergy and genius. She called it 'her first child, ' and there, forty-five years later, she returned to pass the last seven years ofher life, as in a home, a room having been gratefully appropriated toher use by the trustees of the asylum. 

At this date, Dr. S. G. Howe wrote her: "God grant me to look backupon some three years of my life with a part of the self-approval youmust feel. I ask no higher fortune. No one need say to you, Go on! foryou have heard a higher than any human voice, and you will followwhithersoever it calleth. " Indeed, she already had much of her futurework prepared. While waiting for the Legislature in New Jersey to takeup her bill, she had canvassed Pennsylvania and had the happiness tosee a bill pass the Legislature of that State founding the DixmontHospital, her second child, soon after the birth of her first. TheDixmont Hospital is the only one of her many children that she wouldallow to be even indirectly named for her. Meanwhile, she hadcanvassed Kentucky, had been before the Legislature in Tennessee, and, seven days after the passage of her bill in New Jersey, she writesfrom a steamer near Charleston, S. C. , as follows: "I designed usingthe spring and summer chiefly in examining the jails and poorhouses ofIndiana and Illinois. Having successfully completed my mission inKentucky, I learned that traveling in those States would bedifficult, if not impossible, for some weeks to come, on account ofmud and rains. This decided me to examine the prisons and hospitals ofNew Orleans, and, returning, to see the state prisons of Louisiana atBaton Rouge, of Mississippi at Jackson, of Arkansas at Little Rock, ofMissouri at Jefferson City, and of Illinois at Alton. .. . I have seenincomparably more to approve than to censure in New Orleans. I tookthe resolution, being so far away, of seeing the state institutions ofGeorgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Though this has provedexcessively fatiguing, I rejoice that I have carried out my purpose. "

Between June 1843 and August 1847, she states in a letter that shetraveled 32, 470 miles, her conveyance being by steamboat whenpossible; otherwise by stage-coach. It is suggestive of the wrecks anddelays she had experienced with the shattered coaches and mud roads ofthe south and west that, as we are told, she "made a practice ofcarrying with her an outfit of hammer, wrench, nails, screws, a coilof rope, and straps of stout leather, which under many a mishapsufficed to put things to rights and enable her to pursue herjourney. " "I have encountered nothing so dangerous as river fords, "she writes. "I crossed the Yadkin when it was three-quarters of a milewide, rough bottom, often in places rapid currents; the water alwaysup to the carriage bed, and sometimes flowing in. The horses restedtwice on sand-bars. A few miles beyond the river having just crossed adeep branch two hundred yards wide, the axletree broke, and awayrolled one of the back wheels. "

When she said that river fords were her greatest danger, she must haveforgotten an encounter with a highwayman. She was making a stagejourney in Michigan, and noticed with some consternation that thedriver carried a brace of pistols. To her inquiries he explained thatthere had been robberies on the road. "Give me the pistols, " she said;"I will take care of them. " More in awe of her than of robbers, thedriver reluctantly obeyed. Passing through a dismal forest theexpected happened. A man seized the horses and demanded her purse. Shemade him a little speech, asked if he was not ashamed, told him herbusiness, and concluded, "If you have been unfortunate, are indistress and in want of money, I will give you some. " Meanwhile therobber had turned "deathly pale, " and when she had finished, exclaimed, "My God, that voice. " He had once heard her address theprisoners in the Philadelphia penitentiary. He begged her to pass, anddeclined to take the money she offered. She insisted, lest he might beagain tempted before he found employment. People obeyed when sheinsisted, and he took her gift and disappeared. 

Think of the hotel accommodations, --the tables and beds, --she musthave encountered in these wild journeys. This is the woman who, a fewyears ago, seemed to be dying with hemorrhages of the lungs. Did shehave no more of them? Oh, yes; we are assured that "again and againshe was attacked with hemorrhages and again and again prostrated bymalarial fever. " A physician said, "Her system became actuallysaturated with malaria. " Invalid as she almost always was, she hadleft her foot-prints in most of the states of the Union and hadcarried the war into the British Provinces, where she had been themeans of establishing three insane hospitals: one in Toronto, one inHalifax, one at St. John, Newfoundland, besides providing a fleet oflife-boats at Sable Island, known as "The Graveyard of Ships, " off thecoast of Nova Scotia. 

In the United States, during these twelve years, she "promoted andsecured, " to use her own phrase, the enlargement of three asylums: atWorcester, Mass. , at Providence, R. I. , and at Utica, N. Y. , and theestablishment of thirteen, one in each of the following states: NewJersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, andMaryland, with the Hospital for Insane Soldiers and Sailors, atWashington, D. C. 

In 1850, Miss Dix proposed a larger scheme of philanthropy than wasever before projected by any mortal. What is more, but for one man, she would have carried it out. She petitioned Congress to appropriate12, 000, 000 acres of public lands for the benefit of the indigentinsane, deaf and dumb, and blind. A bill to that effect wasintroduced, watched by her through two sessions, and finally passed byboth Houses. She was inundated with congratulations from far and near;but the bill was vetoed on constitutional grounds by President Pierce. The day for giving away the public lands in sheets had not come. 

The blow seems to have been more than Miss Dix could endure. She wentabroad for change and rest. What rest meant to her, she expresses ina letter to a friend at home:

 "Rest is not quitting the active career: Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere. "

These lines, borrowed from John S. Dwight have been, not unnaturally, attributed to her. She wrote many things perhaps quite as poetical. 

Not much of the verse, which came from her prolific pen, wasconsidered even by herself to deserve publication, but verse-writingis said to had been the never-failing diversion of her leisure hours. Mrs. Caroline A. Kennard credits her with the following lines which, though very simple, are quite as good as much that has beenimmortalized in our hymn books:

 "In the tender, peaceful moonlight, I am from the world apart, While a flood of golden glory Fills alike my room and heart. 

 As I gaze upon the radiance Shining on me from afar, I can almost see beyond it, -- Almost see 'the gates ajar. '

 Tender thoughts arise within me Of the friends who've gone before, Absent long but not forgotten, Resting on the other shore. 

 And my soul is filled with longing That when done with earth and sin, I may find the gates wide open There for me to enter in. "

Apparently, she wrote her poetry for herself, as an unskilled musicianmight play for his own amusement. 

The rest which Miss Dix allowed herself between September 1854 andSeptember 1856, was to visit the chief hospitals and prisons inEurope. Edinburgh, the Channel Islands, Paris, Rome, Naples, Constantinople, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, and again Paris and London: these places mark thecourse of her two years' pilgrimage among the prisons and hospitals ofEurope. She found much to admire in this journey, but sometimes abusesto correct. We must content ourselves with an incident from Edinburgh, perfectly in character. She found in that city private insanehospitals, if they could be dignified by the name, under suchconditions of mismanagement as shocked even her experienced nerves. Having reported the facts to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh to nopurpose, she was advised to lay the matter before the Home Secretaryin London. The Provost knew of this intention and resolved toforestall her by taking the train for London the next morning; solittle did he know Miss Dix. She boarded the night train, and was onthe spot before him, had her interview, secured the appointment of aroyal commission and, ultimately the correction of the abuses of whichshe had complained. 

During the four years that intervened between her return and theoutbreak of the Civil War, she seems to have travelled over most ofher old ground in this country, and to have extended her journeys intothe new states and territories. At the approach of hostilities, itfell to Miss Dix to give the President of the Philadelphia andBaltimore Railroad the first information of a plot to capture the cityof Washington and to assassinate Mr. Lincoln. Acting upon thisinformation, Gen. Butler's Massachusetts troops were sent by boatinstead of rail, and Mr. Lincoln was "secretly smuggled through toWashington. "

By natural selection, Miss Dix was appointed Superintendent of WomenNurses in the federal service, by order of the Secretary of War. Inthis capacity she served through the four years' struggle. In a letterdated December 7, 1864, she writes: "I take no hour's leisure. I thinkthat since the war, I have taken no day's furlough. " Her greatservices were officially recognized by Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary ofWar. 

Having served the country as faithfully as any soldier, during itshour of need, she returned to her former work of promoting andsecuring the erection of hospitals and of visiting those beforeestablished. In 1877, when Miss Dix was seventy-five, Dr. Charles F. Folsom, of Boston, in a book entitled "Diseases of the Mind, " said ofher: "Her frequent visits to our institutions of the insane now, andher searching criticisms, constitute of themselves a better lunacycommission than would be likely to be appointed in many of ourstates. "

She was at that date, however, near the end of her active labors. In1881, at the age of seventy-nine, she retired to the hospital she hadbeen the means of building in Trenton, N. J. , and there she remained, tenderly, even reverently cared for, until her death in 1887. Sopassed to her rest and her reward one of the most remarkable women ofher generation. 

V

SARAH MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI

[Illustration: SARAH MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI]

At Cambridge, it is still possible to pick up interestingreminiscences of Longfellow and Lowell from old neighbors or townsmen, proud even to have seen these celebrities as familiar objects upon thestreet. "And Margaret Fuller, " you suggest, further to tap the memoryof your venerable friend. He smiles gently and says, Margaret Fullerwas before his time; he remembers the table-talk of his youth. Heremembers, when she was a girl at dancing-school, Papanti stopped hisclass and said, "Mees Fuller, Mees Fuller, you sal not be somagnee-fee-cent"; he remembers that, being asked if she thoughtherself better than any one else, she calmly said, "Yes, I do"; and heremembers that Miss Fuller having announced that she accepted theuniverse, a wit remarked that the universe ought to be greatly obligedto her. 

Margaret Fuller was born in 1810, a year later than Longfellow, butwhile Longfellow lived until 1882, Margaret was lost at sea thirtyyears before, in 1850. The last four years of her life were spent inItaly, so that American memories of Margaret must needs go back to1846. Practically it is traditions of her that remain, and notmemories. As she survives in tradition, she seems to have been aperson of inordinate vanity, who gave lectures in drawing-rooms andcalled them "conversations, " uttered a commonplace with the authorityof an oracle, and sentimentalized over art, poetry, or religion, whileshe seemed to herself, and apparently to others, to be talkingphilosophy. She took herself in all seriousness as a genius, ran adazzling career of a dozen years or so in Cambridge and Boston, andthen her light seems to have gone out. She came to the surface, withother newness, in the Transcendental era; she was the priestess of itsmysteries; when that movement ebbed away, her day was over. This isthe impression one would gather, if he had only current oraltraditions of Margaret Fuller. 

If with this impression, wishing to get a first-hand knowledge of hissubject, a student were to read the "Works of Margaret Fuller":--"LifeWithin and Without, " "At Home and Abroad, " "Woman in the NineteenthCentury, " "Art, Literature, and Drama, "--he would be prepared to findeccentricities of style, straining for effect, mystical utterances, attempts at profundity, and stilted commonplace. He would, however, find nothing of this sort, or of any sort of make believe, but simplya writer always in earnest, always convinced, with a fair Englishstyle, perfectly intelligible, intent upon conveying an idea in thesimplest manner and generally an idea which approves itself to thecommon-sense of the reader. There is no brilliancy, no ornament, little imagination, and not a least glimmer of wit. The absence of witis remarkable, since in conversation, wit was a quality for whichMargaret was both admired and feared. But as a writer, Margaret was alittle prosaic, --even her poetry inclined to be prosaic, --but she isearnest, noble, temperate, and reasonable. The reader will beconvinced that there was more in the woman than popular traditionrecognizes. 

One is confirmed in the conviction that the legend does her less thanjustice when he knows the names and the quality of her friends. Nowoman ever had better or more loyal friends than Margaret Fuller. Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channingwere among them and compiled her "Memoirs, " evidently as a labor oflove. George William Curtis knew her personally, and called her "ascholar, a critic, a thinker, a queen of conversation, above all, aperson of delicate insight and sympathy, of the most femininerefinement of feeling and of dauntless courage. " Col. Higginson, afellow-townsman, who from youth to manhood, knew Margaret personally, whose sisters were her intimates, whose family, as he tells us, was"afterwards closely connected" with hers by marriage, and who hasstudied all the documents and written her biography, says she was a"person whose career is more interesting, as it seems to me, than thatof any other American of her sex; a woman whose aims were high andwhose services great; one whose intellect was uncommon, whose activitywas incessant, whose life, varied, and whose death, dramatic. "

There still remains the current legend, and a legend, presumably, hassome foundation. If we attempt to unite the Margaret Fuller of commontradition with Margaret Fuller as estimated by her friends, we shallassume that she was not a wholly balanced character, --that she musthave been a great and noble woman to have had such friends, but thatthere may have been in her some element of foolishness which herfriends excused and at which the public smiled. 

Margaret was the fifth in descent from Lieut. Thomas Fuller, who camefrom England in 1638, and who celebrated the event in a poem of whichthe first stanza is as follows:

 "In thirty-eight I set my foot On this New England shore; My thoughts were then to stay one year, And then remain no more. "

The poetry is on a level with other colonial poetry of the period. 

Timothy Fuller, the grandfather of Margaret, graduated at HarvardCollege in 1760, became a clergyman, and was a delegate to theMassachusetts State Convention which adopted the Federal Constitution. He had five sons, all of whom became lawyers. "They were in general, "says Col. Higginson, "men of great energy, pushing, successful, ofimmense and varied information, of great self-esteem, and without aparticle of tact. " The evidence is that Margaret reproduced, in asomewhat exaggerated form, all these Fuller characteristics, good andbad. The saying is quoted from Horace Mann that if Margaretwas unpopular, "it was because she probably inherited thedisagreeableness of forty Fullers. "

Timothy Fuller, Margaret's father, was the oldest of these brothersand, Col. Higginson says, "the most successful and the most assured. "He graduated at Harvard, second in his class, in 1801, lived inCambridge, and represented the Middlesex district in Congress from1817 to 1825. He was a "Jeffersonian Democrat" and a personal friendand political supporter of John Quincy Adams. He married Margaret, thedaughter of Major Peter Crane. Mrs. Fuller was as gentle andunobtrusive as her stalwart husband was forceful and uncompliant. Sheeffaced herself even in her own home, was seen and not heard, thoughapparently not very conspicuously seen. She had eight children, ofwhom Margaret was the first, and when this busy mother escaped fromthe care of the household, it was to take refuge in her flower garden. A "fair blossom of the white amaranth, " Margaret calls this mother. The child's nature took something from both of her parents, and wasboth strong and tender. 

Her father assumed the entire charge of Margaret's education, settingher studying Latin at the age of six, not an unusual feat in that dayfor a boy, but hitherto unheard of for a girl. Her lessons wererecited at night, after Mr. Fuller returned from his office in Boston, often at a late hour. "High-pressure, " says Col. Higginson, "is badenough for an imaginative and excitable child, but high-pressure bycandle-light is ruinous; yet that was the life she lived. " The effectof these night lessons was to leave the child's brain both tired andexcited and in no condition to sleep. It was considered singular thatshe was never ready for bed. She was hustled off to toss on herpillow, to see horrid visions, to have nightmare, and sometimes towalk in her sleep. Terrible morning headaches followed, and Margaretwas considered a delicate child. One would like to know what Latin atsix would have done for her, without those recitations bycandle-light. 

Mr. Fuller did not consider it important that a child should havejuvenile books and Margaret's light reading consisted of Shakspere, Cervantes, and Molière. She gives an interesting account of herdiscovery of Shakspere at the age of eight. Foraging for entertainmenton a dismal winter Sunday afternoon, she took down a volume ofShakspere and was soon lost in the adventures and misadventures ofRomeo and Juliet. Two hours passed, when the child's exceeding quietattracted attention. "That is no book for Sunday, " said her father, "put it away. " Margaret obeyed, but soon took the book again to followthe fortunes of her lovers further. This was a fatal indiscretion; theforbidden volume was again taken from her and she was sent to bed as apunishment for disobedience. 

Meanwhile, the daily lessons to her father or to a private tutor wenton; Virgil, Horace and Ovid were read in due course, and the study ofGreek was begun. Margaret never forgave her father for robbing her ofa proper childhood and substituting a premature scholastic education. "I certainly do not wish, " she says, "that instead of these masters, Ihad read baby books, written down to children, but I do wish that Ihad read no books at all till later, --that I had lived with toys andplayed in the open air. "

Her early and solitary development entailed disadvantages which only avery thoughtful parent could have foreseen. When, later, Margaret wassent to school, she had no companions in study, being in advance ofthe girls of her age, with whom she played, and too young for theolder set with whom she was called to recite. "Not only, " she says, "Iwas not their schoolmate, but my book-life and lonely habits had givena cold aloofness to my whole expression, and veiled my manner with ahauteur which turned all hearts away. "

The effects of her training upon her health, Margaret appears to haveexaggerated. She thought it had "checked her growth, wasted herconstitution, " and would bring her to a "premature grave. " While herlessons to her father by candle-light continued, there weresleeplessness, bad dreams, and morning headaches, but after this hadgone on one year, Mr. Fuller was elected to Congress, spent most ofhis time in Washington, and a private tutor gave the lessons, presumably at seasonable hours. No one with a "broken constitution"could have performed her later literary labors, and she was notthreatened with a "premature grave" when Dr. Frederick Henry Hedgemade her acquaintance in Cambridge society. "Margaret, " he says, "wasthen about thirteen, --a child in years, but so precocious in hermental and physical development, that she passed for eighteen ortwenty. Agreeably to this estimate, she had her place in society as afull-grown lady. When I recall her personal appearance as she wasthen, and for ten or twelve years subsequent, I have the idea of ablooming girl of florid complexion and vigorous health, with atendency to robustness of which she was painfully conscious, andwhich, with little regard to hygienic principles, she endeavored tosuppress and conceal, thereby preparing for herself much futuresuffering. " She had, he says, "no pretensions to beauty then, or atany time, " yet she "was not plain, " a reproach from which she wassaved "by her blond and abundant hair, by her excellent teeth, by hersparkling, dancing, busy eyes, " and by a "graceful and peculiarcarriage of her head and neck. " He adds that "in conversation she hadalready, at that early age, begun to distinguish herself, and mademuch the same impression in society that she did in after years, " butthat she had an excessive "tendency to sarcasm" which frightened shyyoung people and made her notoriously unpopular with the ladies. 

At this period Margaret attended a seminary for young ladies inBoston. Cambridge was then, according to Col. Higginson, a vast, sparsely settled village, containing between two and three thousandinhabitants. In the Boston school, Dr. Hedge says, "the inexperiencedcountry girl was exposed to petty persecutions from the dashing missesof the city, " and Margaret paid them off by "indiscriminate sarcasms. "

Margaret's next two years were spent at a boarding school in Groton. Her adventures in this school are supposed to be narrated in herdramatic story entitled "Mariana, " in the volume called "Summer on theLakes. " Mariana at first carried all before her "by her love of wilddances and sudden song, her freaks of passion and wit, " but abusingher privileges, she is overthrown by her rebellious subjects, broughtto great humiliation, and receives some needed moral instructions. 

At fifteen, Margaret returned to Cambridge and resumed her privatestudies, except that, for a Greek recitation, she attended an academyin which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was then fitting for college. Herday at this period, as she gives it, was occupied thus: she rosebefore five, walked an hour, and practiced at the piano till seven:breakfasted and read French till eight; read Brown's philosophy, twoor three lectures, till half past nine; went to school and studiedGreek till twelve; recited, went home, and practiced till two; dined;lounged half an hour, read two hours in Italian, walked or rode, andspent her evenings leisurely with music or friends. Plainly she oughtto have been one of the learned women of her generation. 

A school composition of Margaret impressed her fellow pupil, Dr. Holmes, as he relates, with a kind of awe. It began loftily with thewords, "It is a trite remark, " a phrase which seemed to the boy verymasterful. The girls envied her a certain queenliness of manner. "Wethought, " says one of them, "that if we could only come into school inthat way, we could know as much Greek as she did. " She was accustomedto fill the hood of her cloak with books, swing them over hershoulder, and march away. "We wished, " says this lady, "that ourmothers would let us have hooded cloaks, that we might carry our booksin the same way. "

It is known that Margaret had several love affairs and, in a laterletter, she refers to one which belongs to this period, and whichappears to have been the first of the series. She meets her old adoreragain at the age of thirty and writes to a friend who knew of theyouthful episode. He had the same powerful eye, calm wisdom, refinedobservation and "the imposing _maniere d'etre_ which anywhere wouldgive him influence among men"; but in herself, she says, "There isscarcely a fibre left of the haughty, passionate, ambitious child heremembered and loved. "

Though a precocious girl and in a way fascinating, there is evidencethat Margaret was crude and unformed socially, due perhaps to thehabit of considering her mother as a negligible quantity. Cambridgeladies preserved an unpleasant portrait of the child as she appearedat a grand reception given by Mr. Fuller to President Adams in 1826, "one of the most elaborate affairs of the kind, " says Col. Higginson, "that had occurred in Cambridge since the ante-revolutionary days ofthe Lechmeres and Vassals. " Margaret ought to have been dressed by anartist, but apparently, a girl of sixteen, she was left to her owndevices. She appeared, we are told, with a low-necked dress badly cut, tightly laced, her arms held back as if pinioned, her hair curled allover her head, and she danced quadrilles very badly. This escapade wasnot allowed to repeat itself. Certain kind and motherly Cambridgeladies took the neglected child in hand, tamed her rude strength, andsubdued her manners. Col. Higginson mentions half a dozen of theseexcellent ladies, among them his mother, at whose feet "this studious, self-conscious, overgrown girl" would sit, "covering her hands withkisses and treasuring every word. "

Chief among Margaret's motherly friends was Mrs. Eliza Farrar, wife ofa Harvard professor, an authoress of merit, "of uncommon character andcultivation, who had lived much in Europe, and who, with no childrenof her own, " became a kind of foster-mother to Margaret. She hadMargaret "constantly at her own house, reformed her hairdresser, instructed her dressmaker, and took her to make calls and onjourneys. " Margaret was an apt pupil, and the good training of thesemany Cambridge mothers was apparent when, ten years later, Mr. Emersonmade her acquaintance. "She was then, as always, " he says, "carefullyand becomingly dressed, and of lady-like self-possession. "

The seven years in Cambridge, from Margaret's fifteenth to hertwenty-third year, though uneventful, were, considering merely thepleasure of existence, the most delightful of her life. She was aschool-girl as much or as little as she cared to be; her health, whennot overtaxed, was perfect; her family though not rich, were in easycircumstances; her father was distinguished, having just retired fromCongress after eight years of creditable service; and, partly perhapsfrom her father's distinction, she had access to the best socialcircles of Cambridge. "In our evening reunions, " says Dr. Hedge, "shewas always conspicuous by the brilliancy of her wit, which needed butlittle provocation to break forth in exuberant sallies, that drewaround her a knot of listeners, and made her the central attraction ofthe hour. Rarely did she enter a company in which she was not aprominent object. " Her conversational talent "continued to developitself in these years, and was certainly" he thinks, "her most decidedgift. One could form no adequate idea of her ability without hearingher converse. .. . For some reason or other, she could never deliverherself in print as she did with her lips. " Emerson, in perfectagreement with this estimate says, "Her pen was a non-conductor. " Thereader will not think this true in her letters, where often the wordsseem to palpitate. Doubtless the world had no business to see her loveletters, but one will find there a woman who, if she could speak asshe writes, must have poured herself out in tidal waves. 

Dr. Hedge was struck by two traits of Margaret's character, repeatedlymentioned by others, but to which it is worth while to have histestimony. The first was a passionate love for the beautiful: "I havenever known one who seemed to derive such satisfaction from beautifulforms"; the second was "her intellectual sincerity. Her judgment tookno bribes from her sex or her sphere, nor from custom, nor tradition, nor caprice. "

Margaret was nineteen years old when Dr. James Freeman Clarke, then ayoung man in college, made her acquaintance. "We both lived inCambridge, " he says, "and from that time until she went to reside inGroton in 1833, I saw her or heard from her almost every day. Therewas a family connection between us, and we called each other cousins. "Possessing in a greater degree than any person he ever knew, the powerof magnetizing others, she had drawn about her a circle of girlfriends whom she entertained and delighted by her exuberant talent. They came from Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, Brookline, and met now atone house and now at another of these pleasant towns. Dr. Hedge alsoknows of this charming circle, and says, "she loved to draw these fairgirls to herself, and make them her guests, and was never so happy aswhen surrounded in company, by such a bevy. "

With all her social activity, Margaret kept up her studies at a ratethat would be the despair of a young man in college. "She already, when I first became acquainted with her, " says Dr. Clarke, "had becomefamiliar with the masterpieces of French, Italian, and Spanishliterature, " and was beginning German, and in about three months, shewas reading with ease the masterpieces of German literature. Meanwhile, she was keeping up her Greek as a pastime, reading over andover the dialogues of Plato. Still there is time for Mr. Clarke towalk with her for hours beneath the lindens or in the garden, or, on asummer's day to ride with her on horseback from Cambridge toNewton, --a day he says, "all of a piece, in which my eloquentcompanion helped me to understand my past life and her own. "

We cannot wonder that, at the age of twenty-three, Margaretreluctantly left Cambridge where there was so much that she loved, andwent with her family to a farm in Groton where, with certainunpleasant school-girl memories, there was nothing that she loved atall. In 1833, at the age of sixty-five Mr. Fuller retired from his lawpractice and bought an estate in Groton, with the double purpose offarming his lands for income, and, in his leisure, writing a historyof the United States, for which his public life had been apreparation, and towards which he had collected much material. Margaret's most exacting duties were the education of the youngerchildren, which left her much time for her favorite studies. She hadcorrespondents by the score; her friends visited her; Cambridge homeswere open to her; and Mrs. Farrar took her on a delightful journey toNewport, Hudson River and Trenton Falls. Still we cannot add the twoyears in Groton to her happy period, because she allowed herself to beintensely miserable. Six years later, in a moment of penitence, shesaid of this period, "Had I been wise in such matters then as now, howeasy and fair I might have made the whole. "

She fought her homesickness by overwork, so that Emerson says, "herreading in Groton was at a rate like Gibbon's, " and she paid thepenalty of her excesses by a serious illness which threatened to befatal, and from which perhaps she never fully recovered. It was someconsolation that her father was melted to an unwonted exhibition oftenderness, and that he said to her in this mood, "My dear, I havebeen thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you haveany faults. You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I donot know that you have a single fault. "

Events were soon to make this remark one of her dearest memories. In ashort time, death separated the father and child, who had been so muchto each other. In 1835, Mr. Fuller fell a victim to cholera, and diedin three days. For a year or more, Margaret's heart had been set upona visit to Europe for study; the trip had been promised by her father;it had been arranged that she should accompany her friends, theFarrars; but the death of Mr. Fuller dissolved this dream, and, in herjournal, solemnly praying that "duty may now be the first object andself set aside, " she dedicates her strength to her "mother, brothers, and sister. " No one can read the "Memoirs" without feeling that shekept her vows. 

The estate of Mr. Fuller finally yielded $2, 000 to each of the sevenchildren, much less, Margaret says, than was anticipated. Withreason, she wrote, "Life, as I look forward, presents a scene ofstruggle and privation only. " In the winter, at Mrs. Farrar's, Margaret met Mr. Emerson; the summer following she visited at hishouse in Concord. There she met Mr. Alcott and engaged to teach in hisschool in Boston. 

Margaret Fuller's visit at Mr. Emerson's in 1836 had for her veryimportant consequences. It was the first of many visits and was thebeginning of an intimacy which takes its place among the mostinteresting literary friendships in the history of letters. To thisfriendship Col. Higginson devotes a separate chapter in his biographyof Margaret, and in the "Memoirs, " under the title of "Visits toConcord, " Mr. Emerson gives a charming account of it in more than ahundred pages. 

Mr. Emerson was by no means the stranger to Margaret that she was tohim. She had sat under his preaching during his pastorate at theSecond Church in Boston, and "several of his sermons, " so she wrote toa friend, "stood apart in her memory like landmarks in her spiritualhistory. " It appears that she had failed to come to close quarterswith this timid apostle. A year after he left his pulpit, she wrote ofhim as the "only clergyman of all possible clergymen who eludes myacquaintance. "

When, at length, she was invited to Concord, it was as Mrs. Emerson'sguest, not as his: "she came to spend a fortnight with my wife. "However, at last she was under his roof. "I still remember, " he says, "the first half hour of her conversation. .. . Her extreme plainness, --atrick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids, --the nasal toneof her voice--all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never getfar. .. . I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked. .. . Shehad an incredible variety of anecdotes, and the readiest wit to givean absurd turn to whatever passed; and the eyes, which were so plainat first, soon swam with fun and drolleries, and the very tides of joyand superabundant life. "

The practical outcome of the visit was an engagement to teach in Mr. Alcott's school. Under date of August 2, 1836, Mr. Alcott writes, "Emerson called this morning and took me to Concord to spend the day. At his house, I met Margaret Fuller . .. And had some conversation withher about taking Miss Peabody's place in my school. " That is to say, Mr. Emerson had in his house a brilliant young lady who, by stress ofcircumstances, wanted a situation; he had a friend in Boston in whoseschool there was a vacancy; Mr. Emerson, at some pains to himself, brought the parties together. Nor was this the last time that Mr. Emerson befriended Margaret. 

It appears from Mr. Alcott's diary that Miss Fuller began herengagement with January, that she taught Latin and French at theschool, and French, German, and Italian to private classes. For aclass of beginners, she "thought it good success, " she says, "when atthe end of three months, they could read twenty pages of German at alesson, and very well. " An advanced class in German read Goethe'sHermann and Dorothea, Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia, and the firstpart of Faust, "three weeks of thorough study, " she calls it, "asvaluable to me as to them. "

The class in Italian went at an equal pace. At the same time she hadthree private pupils, to one of whom, every day for ten weeks, shetaught Latin "orally, "--in other words, Latin conversation. In herleisure, she "translated, one evening every week, German authors intoEnglish for the gratification of Dr. Channing. " It is to be hoped thatshe was paid for this service, because she found it far frominteresting. "It is not very pleasant, " she writes, "for Dr. Channingtakes in subjects more deliberately than is conceivable to us femininepeople. "

In the spring of 1837, Margaret accepted an invitation to teach in aprivate academy in Providence, R. I. --four hours a day, at a salary of$1, 000. We are not told how this invitation came to her, but it is notdifficult to detect the hand of Mr. Emerson. The proprietor of theschool was an admirer of Emerson, so much so that he brought Emersonfrom Concord in June following, to dedicate a new school building. Hisrelation to both parties makes it probable that Margaret owed hersecond engagement, as she did her first, to the good offices of Mr. Emerson. 

She taught in this school with success, two years, "worshipped by thegirls, " it is said, "but sometimes too sarcastic for the boys. " Thetask of teaching, however, was irksome to her, her mind was inliterature; she had from Mr. Ripley a definite proposition to write a"Life of Goethe, " a task of which she had dreamed many years; and sheresigned her position, and withdrew from the profession ofschool-teacher, at the end of 1838. Her life of Goethe was neverwritten, but it was always dancing before her eyes and, more thanonce, determined her course. 

In the following spring, Margaret took a pleasant house in JamaicaPlain, "then and perhaps now, " Col. Higginson says, "the most ruraland attractive suburb of Boston. " Here she brought her mother and theyounger children. Three years later, she removed with them toCambridge, and for the next five years, she kept the family together, and made a home for them. In addition to the income of the estate, sheexpected to meet her expenses by giving lessons. Two pupils came withher from Providence, and other pupils came for recitations, by whomshe was paid at the rate of two dollars an hour. 

With these resources the life in Jamaica Plain began very quietly andpleasantly. To be quiet however was not natural to Margaret. Besides, she had fallen upon what, intellectually, were stirring times. It wasat the high tide of the Transcendental movement. William HenryChanning who, like Margaret, was a part of it, says, "the summer of1839 saw the full dawn of this strange enthusiasm. " As he brieflydefines it "Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was apilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to thetemple of the living God in the soul. " Its disciples, says Mr. Channing, "were pleasantly nick-named the 'Like-minded, ' on the groundthat no two were of the same opinion. " Of this company, he says, "Margaret was a member by the grace of nature. .. . Men, her superiorsin years, in fame and social position, treated her more with thefrankness due from equal to equal, than the half condescendingdeference with which scholars are wont to adapt themselves towomen. .. . It was evident that they prized her verdict, respected hercriticism, feared her rebuke, and looked to her as an umpire. " Inspeaking, "her opening was deliberate, like the progress of a massiveforce gaining its momentum; but as she felt her way, and moving in acongenial element, the sweep of her speech became grand. The style ofher eloquence was sententious, free from prettiness, direct, vigorous, charged with vitality. "

It was a saying of hers that if she had been a man, she would haveaspired to become an orator, and it seems probable she would not haveaspired in vain. The natural sequel to the occasional discussions ofthe summer was the formation of a class of ladies for Conversation, with Margaret as the leader. This class contained twenty-five orthirty ladies, among whom were Mrs. George Bancroft, Mrs. Lydia MariaChild, Mrs. Horace Mann, Mrs. Theodore Parker, Mrs. Waldo Emerson, Mrs. George Ripley, and Mrs. Josiah Quincy. The first series ofthirteen meetings was immediately followed by a second series; theywere resumed the next winter and were continued with unabated interestfor five years. 

The subjects considered in these celebrated Conversations ranged overa very wide field, from mythology and religion, poetry and art, towar, ethics, and sociology. If Margaret had not been brilliant inthese assemblies, she would have fallen short of herself as she hasbeen represented in the Cambridge drawing-rooms. As reported by one ofthe members of the class, "Margaret used to come to the conversationsvery well dressed and, altogether, looked sumptuously. She began themwith an exordium in which she gave her leading views, "--a part whichshe is further said to have managed with great skill and charm, afterwhich she invited others to join in the discussion. Mr. Emerson tellsus that the apparent sumptuousness in her attire was imaginary, the"effect of a general impression made by her genius and mistakenlyattributed to some external elegance; for, " he says, "I have been toldby her most intimate friend, who knew every particular of her conductat the time, that there was nothing of especial expense or splendor inher toilette. "

Mr. Emerson knew a lady "of eminent powers, previously by no meanspartial to Margaret, " who said, on leaving one of these assemblies, "Inever heard, read of, or imagined a conversation at all equal to thiswe have now heard. " Many testimonies have been brought together, inthe "Memoirs, " of the enthusiasm and admiration created by Margaret inthese Conversations. They were probably her most brilliantachievements, though, in the nature of the case, nothing survives ofthem but the echo in these recorded memories of participants. 

Mr. Emerson says that "the fame of these conversations" led to aproposal that Margaret should undertake an evening class to whichgentlemen should be admitted and that he himself had the pleasure of"assisting at one--the second--of these soirees. " Margaret "spokewell--she could not otherwise, --but I remember that she seemedencumbered, or interrupted, by the headiness or incapacity of themen. " A lady who attended the entire series, a "true hand, " he says, reports that "all that depended on others entirely failed" and that"even in the point of erudition, which Margaret did not profess on thesubject, she proved the best informed of the party. " This testimony isworth something in answer to the charge that Margaret's scholarshipwas fictitious, that she had a smattering of many things, but knewnothing thoroughly. She seems to have compared well with others, someof whom were considered scholars. "Take her as a whole, " said Mr. Emerson's informant, "she has the most to bestow on others byconversation of any person I have ever known. "

For these services, Margaret seems to have received liberalcompensation, though all was so cordial that she says she never hadthe feeling of being "a paid Corinne. " For the conversations withladies and gentlemen, according to Mrs. Dall who has published hernotes of them, the tickets were $20 each, for the series of tenevenings. 

It appears from his account that Mr. Emerson saw much of Margaretduring these years and that she was frequently his guest. "The day, "he says, "was never long enough to exhaust her opulent memory; and I, who knew her intimately for ten years, --from July, 1836, till August, 1846, when she sailed for Europe, --never saw her without a surprise ather new powers. " She was as busy as he, and they seldom met in theforenoon, but "In the evening, she came to the library, and many andmany a conversation was there held, " he tells us, "whose details, ifthey could be preserved, would justify all encomiums. They interestedme in every manner;--talent, memory, wit, stern introspection, poeticplay, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of thefuture, each followed each in full activity, and left me, I remember, enriched, and sometimes astonished by the gifts of my guest. "

She was "rich in friends, " and wore them "as a necklace of diamondsabout her neck. " "She was an active and inspiring companion andcorrespondent, and all the art, the thought and nobleness of NewEngland seemed, at that moment, related to her and she to it. She waseverywhere a welcome guest. .. . Her arrival was a holiday, and so washer abode . .. All tasks that could be suspended were put aside tocatch the favorable hour, in walking, riding, or boating to talk withthis joyful guest, who brought wit, anecdotes, love-stories, tragedies, oracles with her, and, with her broad relations to so manyfine friends, seemed like the queen of some parliament of love, whocarried the key to all confidences, and to whom every question hadbeen finally referred. "

At a later day, when Margaret was in Italy, reports came back that shewas making conquests, and having advantageous offers of marriage. EvenMr. Emerson expressed surprise at these social successes in a strangeland, but a lady said to him, "There is nothing extraordinary in it. Had she been a man, any one of those fine girls of sixteen, whosurrounded her here, would have married her: they were all in lovewith her. "

"Of personal influence, speaking strictly, --an efflux, that is, purelyof mind and character, " Mr. Emerson thinks she had more than any otherperson he ever knew. Even a recluse like Hawthorne yielded to thisinfluence. Hawthorne was married to Miss Sophia Peabody in 1842, andbegan housekeeping in the Old Manse in Concord. The day followingtheir engagement Miss Peabody wrote Miss Fuller addressing her "Dear, most noble Margaret, " and saying, "I feel that you are entitled, through our love and regard to be told directly. .. . Mr. Hawthorne, last evening, in the midst of his emotions, so deep and absorbing, after deciding, said that Margaret can now, when she visits Mr. Emerson spend part of the time with us. " A month after the marriage, Hawthorne himself wrote to Margaret, "There is nobody to whom I wouldmore willingly speak my mind, because I can be certain of beingunderstood. " Evidently he is not beginning an acquaintance; he alreadyknows Margaret intimately and respects her thoroughly. There is noevidence, I believe, that during her life, he held any differentopinion of her. 

These facts have become of special interest because, in Italy, eightyears after her death, he wrote in his Note-Book, that Margaret "had astrong and coarse nature" and that "she was a great humbug. " The mostreasonable explanation of this change of view is that Margaret wasdead, poor woman, and could not speak for herself; that she had foughtwith all her might in an Italian Revolution that had failed; thathaving failed, she and her party were discredited; that her enemiessurvived, and Hawthorne listened to them. However his later opinionsmay be explained, the quality of her friends in America, among whomhad been Hawthorne himself, is evidence that Margaret was not of a"coarse nature, " and it is incredible that a "humbug" could haveimposed herself for five years upon those ladies who attended herconversations, not to speak of James Freeman Clarke who was a fairscholar and Dr. Hedge who was a very rare scholar. 

Margaret had her weaknesses, which her friends do not conceal. It wasa weakness, not perhaps that she overestimated herself; that might bepardoned; but that she took no pains to conceal her high opinion ofher abilities and worth. One likes to see an appearance of modesty, and that little deceit Margaret did not practice. On the contrary, Mr. Emerson says, "Margaret at first astonished and then repelled us by acomplacency that seemed the most assured since the days ofScaligar. .. . In the coolest way, she said to her friends, 'I now knowall the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellectcomparable to my own. '. .. It is certain that Margaret occasionally letslip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying thepresence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those whoknew her good sense. " Col. Higginson quotes a saying about theFullers, that "Their only peculiarity was that they said openly aboutthemselves the good and bad things which we commonly suppress aboutourselves and express only about other people. " The common way is notmore sincere, but it is pleasanter. 

In 1840, the second year of Margaret's Conversations, appeared thefirst number of _The Dial_, a literary magazine of limitedcirculation, but destined to a kind of post-mortem immortality. In1841, the Community of Brook Farm was established. An interestingaccount of both enterprises, and of Margaret's part in them, is givenby Mr. Emerson in a paper found in the tenth volume of his collectedWorks. In the preliminary discussions leading to both enterprises, Margaret participated. Like Mr. Emerson, she did not have unqualifiedfaith in the Brook Farm experiment and did not join the community, though she had many friends in it, was a frequent visitor, and had thehonor to sit for the portrait of "Zenobia" in Mr. Hawthorne'sBlithedale Romance. 

Her part in _The Dial_ was more prominent. She edited the first twovolumes of the magazine, being then succeeded by Mr. Emerson, and shewrote for it a paper entitled "Man vs. Men: Woman vs. Women, "afterward expanded and published in a volume under the title, "Womanin the Nineteenth Century, " her second and most famous book. Her firstbook, "Summer on the Lakes, " is an account of a charming journey, withthe family of James Freeman Clarke and others, by steamboat and farmwagon, as far as the Mississippi. It was a voyage of discovery, andher account has permanent historic interest. 

In 1844, Margaret accepted an advantageous offer to become literaryeditor of the _New York Tribune_, a position which she was admirablyqualified to fill. A collection of papers from _The Tribune_, underthe title of "Literature and Art, " made up her third book, publishedin 1846, on the eve of her departure for Europe. 

During her residence in New York, she became greatly interested inphilanthropies, especially in the care of prisoners of her own sex. She visited the jails and prisons, interviewed the inmates, gave them"conversations, " and wrought upon them the same miracle which she hadso often performed in refined drawing-rooms. "If she had been born tolarge fortune, " said Mr. Greeley, "a house of refuge for all femaleoutcasts desiring to return to the ways of virtue would have been oneof her most cherished and first realized conceptions. "

Early in her New York residence must also have occurred that rathermysterious love affair with the young Hebrew, Mr. Nathan, who seemsfirst to have charmed her with his music and then with his heart. After nearly sixty years, the letters which she wrote him, full ofconsuming fire, have at last seen the light. From a passage in one ofthem, it would seem that marriage was not contemplated by eitherparty, that in theory at least they took no thought of the morrow, thebliss of the moment being held sufficient. Evidently there was noengagement, but no one can doubt that on her part there was love. Ofcourse in this changing world, no such relations can be maintained forever, and in the end there will be an awakening, and then pain. 

In 1846, Margaret realized her life-dream and went to Europe. Destinedto a life of adventure, she was accidently separated from her party, and spent a perilous night on Ben Lomond, without a particle ofshelter, in a drenching rain, a thrilling account of which she haswritten. She visited Carlyle and, for a wonder, he let her take ashare in the conversation. To Mr. Emerson he wrote, Margaret "is verynarrow sometimes, but she is truly high. "

On her way to Italy, the goal of her ambition, she visited George Sandand they had such a meeting as two women of genius might. She sailedfrom Genoa for Naples in February, 1847, and arrived in Rome in Mayfollowing. There is much to interest a reader in her Italian life, butthe one thing which cannot be omitted is the story of her marriage tothe Marquis Ossoli. Soon after her arrival in Rome, on a visit to St. Peter's, Margaret became separated from her friends, whom she did notagain discover at the place appointed for meeting. A gentleman seeingher distress, offered to get her a carriage and, not finding one, walked home with her. This was the young Marquis Ossoli, and thusfortuitously the acquaintance began, which was continued by occasionalmeetings. The summer Margaret spent in the north of Italy, and whenshe returned to Rome, she took modest apartments in which she receivedher friends every Monday evening, and the Marquis came very regularly. 

It was not long however before he confessed his love for her and askedher hand in marriage. He was gently rejected, being told that he oughtto marry a younger woman, and that she would be his friend but nothis wife. He however persisted, at length won her consent, and theywere privately married in December. I follow the account of Mrs. William Story, wife of the artist, then residing in Rome. The oldMarquis Ossoli had recently died, leaving an unsettled estate, ofwhich his two older sons, both in the Papal service, were theexecutors. "Every one knows, " says Mrs. Story, "that law is subject toecclesiastical influence in Rome, and that marriage with a Protestantwould be destructive of all prospect of favorable administration. "

The birth of a child a year later, at Rieti in the Appenines, whitherMargaret had retired, made secrecy seem more imperative; or, asMargaret said, in order to defend the child "from the stings ofpoverty, they were patient waiters for the restored law of the land. "The Italian Revolution of 1848 was then in progress. Ossoli herhusband, was a captain in the Civic Guard, on duty in Rome, and theletters which she wrote him at this period of trial, were the onlyfragments of her treasures recovered from the wreck in which sheperished. 

Leaving her babe with his nurse, in April following, she visited Romeand was shut up in the siege by the French army which had been sentto overthrow the provisional government and restore the authority ofthe pope. "Ossoli took station with his men on the walls of theVatican garden where he remained faithfully to the end of the attack. Margaret had entire charge of one of the hospitals. .. . I have walkedthrough the wards with her, " says Mrs. Story, "and seen how comfortingwas her presence to the poor suffering men. 'How long will the Signorastay?' 'When will the Signora come again?' they eagerly asked. .. . Theyraised themselves up on their elbows to get the last glimpse of her asshe was going away. "

In the midst of these dangers, Margaret confided to Mrs. Story thesecret of her marriage and placed in her hands the marriagecertificate and other documents relating to the affair. These paperswere afterward returned to Margaret and were lost in the wreck. 

The failure of the Revolution was the financial ruin of all those whohad staked their fortunes in it. They had much reason to be thankfulif they escaped with their lives. By the intervention of friends, theOssolis were dealt with very leniently. Mr. Greenough, the artist, interested himself in their behalf and procured for them permission toretire, outside the papal territory, to Florence. Ossoli evenobtained a small part of his patrimony. 

Except the disappointment and sorrow over the faded dream of ItalianIndependence, the winter at Florence was one of the bright spots inMargaret's life. She was proud of her husband's part in theRevolution: "I rejoice, " she says, "in all Ossoli did. " She had herbabe with her and her happiness in husband and child was perfect: "Mylove for Ossoli is most pure and tender, nor has any one, except mymother or little children, loved me so genuinely as he does. .. . Ossoliseems to me more lovely and good every day; our darling child is wellnow, and every day more gay and playful. "

She found pleasant and congenial society: "I see the Brownings often, "she says, "and love them both more and more as I know them better. Mr. Browning enriches every hour I spend with him, and is a most cordial, true, and noble man. One of my most prized Italian friends, Marchioness Arconati Visconti, of Milan, is passing the winter here, and I see her almost every day. " Moreover she was busy with acongenial task. At the very opening of the struggle for liberty, sheplanned to write a history of the eventful period, and with thispurpose, collected material for the undertaking, and already had alarge part of the work in manuscript. She finished the writing inFlorence, and much value was set upon it both by herself and by herfriends in Italy. Mrs. Story says, "in the estimation of most of thosewho were in Italy at the time, the loss of Margaret's history andnotes is a great and irreparable one. No one could have possessed somany avenues of direct information from both sides. "

When the spring opened, it was decided to return to America, partly tonegotiate directly with the publisher, but chiefly because, havingexhausted her resources, Margaret's pen must henceforth be the mainreliance of the little family. It is pathetic to know that, aftertheir passage had been engaged, "letters came which, had they reachedher a week earlier, would probably have induced them to remain inItaly. "

They sailed, May 17, 1850, in a merchant vessel, the only otherpassengers being the baby's nurse and Mr. Horace Sumner, a youngerbrother of Senator Sumner. After a protracted and troubled voyage oftwo months, the vessel arrived off the coast of New Jersey, on July18. The "weather was thick. .. . By nine p. M. There was a gale, bymidnight a hurricane, " and at four o'clock on the morning of July 19, the vessel grounded on the shallow sands of Fire Island. The captainhad died of smallpox on the voyage; his widow, the mate in command ofthe vessel, and four seamen reached the shore; Mr. Sumner and theOssolis perished. The cruel part of the tragedy is that it seemsprobable every soul on board might have been saved. Life-boats, onlythree miles away, did not arrive until noon; that is, after eightprecious hours had passed. Moreover, in a moment of penitence, one ofthe life-boat crew said, "Oh, if we had known that any such persons ofimportance were on board, we should have done our best. "

Margaret, the name by which she will always be known, had passed herfortieth birthday at sea on this voyage. It seems a short life inwhich to have crowded so much and such varied experience. She had sometrials even in her youth, but for two-thirds of her existence, shemight have been considered a favorite of fortune. In later life, shehad some battles to fight, but her triumphs were great enough todazzle a person with more modesty than was her endowment. She sufferedin Italy, both for her child left to strangers in the mountains, andfor her adopted country, but they were both causes, in which for her, suffering was a joy. She did not desire to survive her husband andchild, nor to leave them behind, and, we may say, happily they allwent together. "Her life seems to me, " says Col. Higginson, "on thewhole, a triumphant rather than a sad one, " and that is a reasonableverdict, however difficult to render in the presence of such a tragedyas her untimely death. 

VI

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

[Illustration: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE]

"Is this the little woman who made this great war!" exclaimedPresident Lincoln when, in 1862, Mrs. Stowe was introduced to him. There was but one woman in America to whom this could have been saidwithout absurdity. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was so conspicuous a factor inbringing on the war which abolished American slavery that to creditthese results to Mrs. Stowe was not fulsome flattery but gracefulcompliment. 

There are two excellent biographies of Mrs. Stowe, one published in1889, by her son, Rev. Charles E. Stowe, and one, in 1897, by Mrs. Annie Fields. That work will hardly need to be done again. The objectof this sketch is to study the influences that moulded Mrs. Stowe, topresent the salient features of her career, and, incidentally, todiscover her characteristic qualities. Her fame rests upon herliterary achievements, and these are comparatively well known. Herliterary career can hardly be said to have begun until the age offorty and, if this were the only interest her life had for us, wecould pass hastily over her youth. It will be found however that herreligious development, begun prematurely with her fourth year andcontinued without consideration or discretion until at seventeen shebecame a chronic invalid, gives a kind of tragic interest to herearlier years. Her religious education may not have been unique; itmay have been characteristic of much of the religious life of NewEngland, but girls set at work upon the problems of their souls at theage of four have seldom attained the distinction of having theirbiographies written, so that one can study their history. 

Harriet, the second daughter and seventh child of Lyman Beecher andRoxanna Foote, was born in Litchfield, Conn. , June 14, 1811. Therewere three Mrs. Lyman Beechers of whom Roxanna Foote was the first. The Footes were Episcopalians, Harriet, sister of Roxanna, being asMrs. Stowe says, "the highest of High Churchwomen who in her privateheart did not consider my father an ordained minister. " Roxanna, perhaps not so high-church, held out for two years against Dr. Beecher's assaults upon her heart and then consented to become hiswife. 

Mrs. Beecher was a refined and cultivated lady who "read all the newworks that were published at that day, " numbered painting among heraccomplishments, and whose house "was full of little works ofingenuity and taste and skill, which had been wrought by her hand:pictures of birds and flowers, done with minutest skill"; but hergreatest charm was a religious nature full of all gentleness andsweetness. "In no exigency, " says Dr. Beecher, "was she taken bysurprise. She was just there, quiet as an angel above. " There seems tohave been but one thing which this saintly woman with an Episcopalianeducation could not do to meet the expectations of a Congregationalparish, and that was that "in the weekly female prayer-meeting shecould never lead the devotions"; but from this duty she seems to havebeen excused because of her known sensitiveness and timidity. 

Mrs. Beecher died when Harriet was in her fourth year, but she left anindelible impression upon her family. Her "memory met us everywhere, "says Mrs. Stowe; "when father wished to make an appeal to our heartswhich he knew we could not resist, he spoke of mother. " It had beenthe mother's prayer that her sons, of whom there were six, should beministers, and ministers they all were. One incident Mrs. Stoweremembered which may be supposed to have set Sunday apart as a day ofexceptional sanctity. It was that "of our all running and dancing outbefore her from the nursery to the sitting-room one Sabbath morningand her pleasant voice saying after us, 'Remember the Sabbath day tokeep it holy. '" Such early religious impressions made upon the mind ofa child of four would have faded in other surroundings, but it will beseen that Harriet's environment gave no rest to her little soul. 

After the death of her mother, the child was sent to her grandmotherFoote's for a long visit. There she fell to the charge of her auntHarriet, than whom, we are told, "a more energetic human being neverundertook the education of a child. " According to her views, "littlegirls were to be taught to move very gently, to speak softly andprettily, to say 'Yes ma'am' and 'No ma'am, ' never to tear theirclothes, to sew and knit at regular hours, to go to church on Sundayand make all the responses, and to come home and be catechised. Iremember those catechisings when she used to place my little cousinMary and myself bolt upright at her knee while black Dinah and Harvey, the bound boy, were ranged at a respectful distance behind us. .. . Ibecame a proficient in the Church catechism and gave my aunt greatsatisfaction by the old-fashioned gravity and steadiness with which Ilearned to repeat it. " This early training in the catechism and theresponses bore fruit in giving Mrs. Stowe a life-long fondness for theEpiscopal service and ultimately in taking her into the EpiscopalChurch, of which during her last thirty years she was a communicant. Harriet signalized her fifth year by committing to memory twenty-sevenhymns and "two long chapters of the Bible, " and even more perhaps, byaccidentally discovering in the attic a discarded volume of the"Arabian Nights, " with which, she says, her fortune was made. It was amuch more suitable child's book, one would think, than the Churchcatechism or Watts's hymns. 

At the age of six Harriet passed to the care of the second Mrs. LymanBeecher, formerly Harriet Porter, of Portland, Maine, apparently alady of great dignity and character. "We felt, " says Mrs. Stowe, "alittle in awe of her, as if she were a strange princess rather thanour own mamma; but her voice was very sweet, her ways of speaking andmoving very graceful, and she took us up in her lap and let us playwith her beautiful hands which seemed wonderful things, made of pearland ornamented with strange rings. " It appears she was a faithfulmother, though a little severe and repressive. Henry Ward Beecher saidof her: "She did the office-work of a mother if ever a mother did";she "performed to the uttermost her duties, according to her ability";she "was a woman of profound veneration rather than of a warm lovingnature. Therefore her prayer was invariably a prayer of deep yearningreverence. I remember well the impression which it made on me. Therewas a mystic influence about it. A sort of sympathetic hold it had onme, but still I always felt when I went to prayer, as though I weregoing into a crypt, where the sun was not allowed to come; and Ishrunk from it. " To complete the portrait of this conscientious ladywho was to have the supervision of Harriet from her sixth year, thefollowing from a letter of one of the Beecher children is worthquoting: "Mamma is well and don't laugh any more than she did. "Evidently a rather stern and sobering influence had come into theBeecher family. 

"In her religion, " says Mrs. Stowe, "she was distinguished by a mostunfaltering Christ-worship. .. . Had it not been that Dr. Payson hadset up and kept before her a tender, human, loving Christ, she wouldhave been only a conscientious bigot. This image, however, gavesoftness and warmth to her religious life, and I have since noticedhow her Christ-enthusiasm has sprung up in the hearts of all herchildren. " This passage is of peculiar interest as it shows the sourceof what Mrs. Stowe loves to call the "Christ-worship" whichcharacterized the religion of the younger Beechers. Writing at the ageof seventeen, when her soul was tossing between Scylla and Charybdis, Harriet says: "I feel that I love God, --that is, that I love Christ";and in 1876, writing of her brother Henry, she says, "He and I areChrist-worshippers, adoring him as the Image of the InvisibleGod. " Her son refers us to the twenty-fourth chapter of theMinister's Wooing for a complete presentation of this subject "ofChrist-worship. " Mrs. Stowe speaks of this belief as a plain departurefrom ordinary Trinitarianism, as a kind of heresy which it hasrequired some courage to hold. The heresy seems to have consisted inpractically dropping the first and third persons in the Godhead andaccepting Christ as the only God we know or need to consider. 

As Mrs. Stowe during her adult life was an invalid, it is interestingto have Mrs. Beecher's testimony that, on her arrival, she was met bya lovely family of children and "with heartfelt gratitude, " she says, "I observed how cheerful and healthy they were. " When Harriet was tenyears of age, she began to attend the Litchfield Academy and wasrecognized as one of its brightest pupils. She especially excelled inwriting compositions and, at the age of twelve, her essay was one oftwo or three selected to be read at a school exhibition. AfterHarriet's had been read, Dr. Beecher turned to the teacher and asked, "Who wrote that composition?" "Your daughter, Sir, " was the reply. "Itwas, " says Mrs. Stowe, "the proudest moment of my life. "

"Can the immortality of the soul be proved by the light of Nature?"was the subject of this juvenile composition, a strange choice for agirl of twelve summers; but in this family the religious climate wastropical, and forced development. As might have been expected, sheeasily proved that nothing of immortality could be known by the lightof nature. She had been too well instructed to think otherwise. Dr. Beecher himself had no good opinion of 'the light of nature. ' "Theysay, " said he, "that everybody knows about God naturally. A lie. Allsuch ideas are by teaching. " If Harriet had taken the other side ofher question and argued as every believer tries to to-day, she wouldhave deserved some credit for originality. Nevertheless the form ofher argument is remarkable for her years, and would not havedishonored Dr. Beecher's next sermon. This amazing achievement of agirl of twelve can be read in the Life of Mrs. Stowe by her son. 

From the Litchfield Academy, Harriet was sent to the celebrated FemaleSeminary established by her sister Catharine at Hartford, Conn. Shehere began the study of Latin and, "at the end of the first year, madea translation of Ovid in verse which was read at the final exhibitionof the school. " It was her ambition to be a poet and she began a playcalled 'Cleon, ' filling "blank book after blank book with this drama. "Mrs. Fields prints six pages of this poem and the specimens have morethan enough merit to convince one that the author might have attaineddistinction as a poet. Her energetic sister Catharine however put anend to this innocent diversion, saying that she must not waste hertime writing poetry but discipline her mind upon Butler's Analogy. Toenforce compliance, Harriet was assigned to teach the Analogy to aclass of girls as old as herself, "being compelled to master eachchapter just ahead of the class. " This occupation, with Latin, Frenchand Italian, sufficiently protected her from the dissipation ofwriting poetry. 

Harriet remained in the Hartford school, as pupil and teacher, fromher thirteenth to her twenty-third year. In her spiritual history, this was an important period. It may seem that her soul had hithertonot been neglected but as yet youth and a sunny nature had kept herfrom any agonies of Christian experience. Now her time had come. Noone under the care of the stern Puritan, Catharine Beecher, would besuffered to forget her eternal interests. Both of Mrs. Stowe'sbiographers feel the necessity of making us acquainted with thismasterful lady, "whose strong, vigorous mind and tremendouspersonality, " says Mr. Stowe, "indelibly stamped themselves on thesensitive, dreamy, poetic nature of her younger sister. "

It was Catharine's distinction to have written, it is claimed, thebest refutation of Edwards on the Will ever published. She wasundoubtedly the most acute and vigorous intellect in the Beecherfamily. Like all the members of her remarkable family, she wasintensely religious and, at the period when Harriet passed to hercare, gloomily religious. It could not have been otherwise. She hadbeen engaged to marry Prof. Alexander Fisher, of Yale College, a youngman of great promise. Unhappily, he was drowned at sea, and shebelieved his soul was eternally lost. It is futile to ask why YaleCollege should have entrusted a professorship to a man whom the Lordwould send to perdition, or why Miss Beecher should have loved such anabandoned character; it is enough to say that she loved him and thatshe believed his soul to be lost; and was it her fault that she couldnot be a cheerful companion to a young girl of thirteen?

As we have seen, Harriet must not fritter away her time writing plays;she must study Butler's Analogy. She must also read Baxter's SaintsRest, than which, says Mrs. Stowe, "no book ever affected me morepowerfully. As I walked the pavements I wished that they might sinkbeneath me if only I might find myself in heaven. " In this mentalcondition she went to her home in Litchfield to spend her vacation. One dewy fresh Sunday morning of that period stood by itself in hermemory. "I knew, " she says, "it was sacramental Sunday, and thoughtwith sadness that when all the good people should take the bread andwine I should be left out. I tried hard to think of my sins and countthem up; but what with the birds, the daisies, and the brooks thatrippled by the way, it was impossible. " The sermon of Dr. Beecher wasunusually sweet and tender and when he appealed to his hearers totrust themselves to Jesus, their faithful friend, she says, "I longedto cry out I will. Then the awful thought came over me that I hadnever had any conviction of my sins and consequently could not come tohim. " Happily the inspiration came to her that if she neededconviction of sin and Jesus were such a friend, he would give it toher; she would trust him for the whole, and she went home illuminedwith joy. 

When her father returned, she fell into his arms saying, "Father, Ihave given myself to Jesus and he has taken me. " "Is it so?" said he. "Then has a new flower blossomed in the kingdom this day. " This isvery sweet and beautiful and it shows that Dr. Beecher had a tenderheart under his Calvinistic theology. "If she could have been letalone, " says her son, "and taught to 'look up and not down, forwardand not back, out and not in, ' this religious experience might havegone on as sweetly and naturally as the opening of a flower in thegentle rays of the sun. But unfortunately this was not possible at atime when self-examination was carried to an extreme that wascalculated to drive a nervous and sensitive child well-nighdistracted. First, even her sister Catharine was afraid that theremight be something wrong in the case of a lamb that had come into thefold without being first chased all over the lot by the shepherd:great stress being laid on what was called being under conviction. Then also the pastor of the First Church in Hartford, a bosom friendof Dr. Beecher, looked with melancholy and suspicious eyes on thisunusual and doubtful path to heaven. "

Briefly stated, these two spiritual guides put Harriet through aprocess which brought her to a sense of sin that must have filledtheir hearts with joy. She reached the stage when she wrote to herbrother Edward: "My whole life is one continued struggle; I do nothingright. I am beset behind and before, and my sins take away all myhappiness. "

Unfortunately for her, it was at this stage of Harriet's religiousexperience that Dr. Beecher was called to Boston to stem the risingtide of Unitarianism, with its easy notions about conviction of sinand other cardinal elements of a true faith. To be thrown into thefervors of a crusade was just the experience which Harriet's heatedbrain did not need. Her life at this period was divided betweenHartford and Boston, but her heart went with Dr. Beecher to his greatenterprise in Boston, or, as Mrs. Fields says, "This period in Bostonwas the time when Harriet felt she drew nearer to her father than atany other period of her life. "

It will not be necessary to go farther into this controversy than toshow what a cauldron it was for the family of Dr. Beecher. In hisautobiography, Dr. Beecher says, "From the time Unitarianism began toshow itself in this country, it was as fire in my bones. " After hiscall to Boston, he writes again, "My mind had been heating, heating, heating. Now I had a chance to strike. " The situation that confrontedhim in Boston rather inflamed than subdued his spirit. Let Mrs. Stowetell the story herself. "Calvinism or orthodoxy, " she says, "was thedespised and persecuted form of faith. It was the dethroned royalfamily wandering like a permitted mendicant in the city where it onceheld high court, and Unitarianism reigned in its stead. All theliterary men of Massachusetts were Unitarians. All the trustees andprofessors of Harvard College were Unitarians. All the élite of wealthand fashion crowded Unitarian churches. The judges on the bench wereUnitarian, giving decisions by which the peculiar features of churchorganization, so carefully ordained by the Pilgrim Fathers, had beennullified. The dominant majority entered at once into possession ofchurches and church property, leaving the orthodox minority to go outinto schoolhouses and town halls, and build their churches as bestthey could. "

We can hardly suppose that Harriet had read the decision of the court, or that she deemed it necessary; she knew it was wrong by instinct, and the iron entered her soul. The facts appear to have been asfollows: The old parishes in New England included a given territorylike a school district or a voting precinct. Members of a givenparish, if they were communicants, formed themselves into a "church"which was the church of that parish. The court decided that thischurch always remained the church of that parish. Members mightwithdraw, but they withdrew as individuals. They could not withdrawthe church, not even if they constituted a majority. 

The correctness of this decision does not concern us here; it isenough that Dr. Beecher thought it wrong and that Harriet thought itwrong. "The effect of all this, " she says, "upon my father's mind wasto keep him at a white heat of enthusiasm. His family prayers at thisperiod, departing from the customary forms of unexcited hours, becameoften upheavings of passionate emotion, such as I shall never forget. 'Come, Lord Jesus, ' he would say, 'here where the bones of the fathersrest, here where the crown has been torn from thy brow, come andrecall thy wandering children. Behold thy flock scattered upon themountain--these sheep, what have they done! Gather them, gather them, O good shepherd, for their feet stumble upon the dark mountains. '"

The fierce heat of this period was too much for a tender plant likeHarriet. For her state of mind, even Catharine thought the Boston homelife was not entirely suitable. It would be better for her inHartford. "Harriet will have young society here which she cannot haveat home, and I think cheerful and amusing friends will do much forher. " Catharine had received a letter from Harriet which, she says, "made me feel uneasy, " as well it might. Harriet had written hersister: "I don't know as I am fit for anything, and I have thoughtthat I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and myfaults perish in the grave. .. . Sometimes I could not sleep, and havegroaned and cried till midnight, while in the daytime I tried toappear cheerful, and succeeded so well that papa reproved me forlaughing so much. " Life was too serious to permit even an affectationof gaiety. "The atmosphere of that period, " says Mrs. Field, "and theterrible arguments of her father and of her sister Catharine weresometimes more than she could endure. " Her brother Edward was helpfuland comforting. She thanks him for helping her solve some of herproblems, but the situation was critical: "I feared that if you leftme thus I might return to the same dark, desolate state in which I hadbeen all summer. I felt that my immortal interest, my happiness forboth worlds, was depending on the turn my feelings might take. "

Dr. Beecher was too much absorbed with his mission to observe what wasgoing on in his own family, unless there chanced to be an unexpectedoutburst of gaiety. "Every leisure hour was beset by people who camewith earnest intention to express to him those various phases ofweary, restless wandering desire proper to an earnest people whosetraditional faith has been broken up. .. . Inquirers were constantlycoming with every imaginable theological problem . .. He was to be seenall day talking with whoever would talk . .. Till an hour or two beforethe time (of service), when he would rush up to his study; . .. Just asthe last stroke of the bell was dying away, he would emerge from thestudy with his coat very much awry, come down stairs like a hurricane, stand impatiently protesting while female hands that ever lay in waitadjusted his cravat and settled his collar . .. And hooking wife ordaughter like a satchel on his arm, away he would start on such a racethrough the streets as left neither brain nor breath till the churchwas gained. " Such, very much abbreviated, is Mrs. Stowe's portrait ofher father at this period. It is a good example of her power ofdelineation; but what a life was this for a half distracted girl likeHarriet! Much better for her would have been the old serene, peaceful, quiet life of Litchfield. 

She had several kinds of religious trouble. It troubled her that inthe book of Job, God should seem "to have stripped a dependentcreature of all that renders life desirable, and then to have answeredhis complaints from the whirlwind, and, instead of showing mercy andpity, to have overwhelmed him with a display of his power andjustice. " It troubled her that when she allowed herself to take amilder view of deity, "I feel, " she says, "less fear of God and, inview of sin, I feel only a sensation of grief. " This was an alarmingdecline. It troubled her again that she loved literature, whereas sheought only to care for religion. She writes to Edward: "You speak ofyour predilections for literature being a snare to you. I have foundit so myself. " Evidently, as she has before said, she was beset behindand before. What was perhaps worst of all, the heavens seemed closedto her. Calvinism was pure agnosticism; and she had been educated aCalvinist. There was no 'imminent God, ' in all and through all, forCalvinism; that came in with Transcendentalism, a form of thoughtwhich never seems to have touched Mrs. Stowe. She seems always tohave felt, as at this period she writes Edward, that "still, afterall, God is a being afar off. " Nevertheless, there was Christ, butChrist at this period was also afar off: "I feel that I loveGod, --that is that I love Christ, --that I find happiness in it, andyet it is not that kind of comfort which would arise from freecommunication of my wants and sorrows to a friend. I sometimes wishthat the Savior were visibly present in this world, that I might go tohim for a solution of some of my difficulties. "

It will be seen from this passage that Harriet's storm-tossed soul wassettling down upon Christ as the nearest approach to God one couldgain in the darkness, and with this she taught herself to be content. "So, after four years of struggling and suffering, " writes her son, "she returns to the place where she started from as a child ofthirteen. It has been like watching a ship with straining masts andstorm-beaten sails, buffeted by the waves, making for the harbor, andcoming at last to quiet anchorage. " One cannot help reflecting howdifferent would have been her experience in the household of Dr. Channing; but Dr. Beecher would sooner have trusted her in a den ofwolves. 

Harriet was seventeen years old when, mentally, she reached her quietanchorage but, physically as might be expected, it was with aconstitution undermined and with health broken. "She had not grown tobe a strong woman, " says Mrs. Fields; "the apparently healthy andhearty child had been suffered to think and feel, to study and starve(as we say), starve for relaxation, until she became a woman of muchsuffering and many inadequacies of physical life. " A year or two laterHarriet herself writes, "This inner world of mine has become worn outand untenable, " and again, "About half my time I am scarcely alive. .. . I have everything but good health. .. . Thought, intense emotionalthought, has been my disease. "

At the end of six restless and stormy years, in 1832, Dr. Beecherresigned his Boston pastorate to accept the presidency of LaneTheological Seminary at Cincinnati, Ohio, Catharine and Harrietaccompanying the family with the purpose of establishing a high gradeschool for young women. The plan was successfully carried out, and the"Western Female Institute" marked a new stage in education west of theAlleghenies. One of Harriet's early achievements at Cincinnati was thepublication of a text-book in geography, her first attempt atauthorship. She made her entry into the field of imaginativeliterature by gaining a prize of $50 for a story printed in _TheWestern Magazine_. 

Her connection with the "Western Female Institute" was brief, and theprosecution of a literary career was postponed, by her marriage in1836, with Prof. Calvin E. Stowe; or, as she announces this momentousevent: "about half an hour more and your old friend, schoolmate, sister, etc. , will cease to be Hattie Beecher and change to nobodyknows who. "

The married life of Mrs. Stowe covered a period of fifty years and wasa conspicuously happy one. Prof. Stowe, who seemed so much like a mythto the general public, was a man of great learning and keenintelligence, unimaginative as he says himself, but richly endowedwith "a certain broad humor and drollery. " His son tells us that hewas "an inimitable mimic and story-teller. No small proportion of Mrs. Stowe's success as a literary woman is to be attributed to him. " TheSam Lawson stories are said to be a little more his than hers, being"told as they came from Mr. Stowe's lips with little or noalteration. " For her scholarly husband, Mrs. Stowe had the highestappreciation and the prettiest way of expressing it: "If you were notalready my dearly loved husband, " she writes him, "I should certainlyfall in love with you. " Prof. Stowe could also write a love-letter:"There is no woman like you in this wide world. Who else has so muchtalent with so little self-conceit; so much reputation with so littleaffectation; so much literature with so little nonsense; so muchenterprise with so little extravagance; so much tongue with so littlescold; so much sweetness with so little softness; so much of so manythings and so little of so many other things. " If a man's wife is tohave her biography written, he will not be sorry that he has sent hersome effusive love-letters. 

Fourteen years of Mrs. Stowe's beautiful married life were spent inCincinnati, with many vicissitudes of ill-health, some poverty, andthe birth of six children, three sons and three daughters. One can getsome idea both of the happiness and the hardship of that life from herletters. In 1843, seven years after marriage, she writes, "Our straitsfor money this year are unparalleled even in our annals. Even ourbright and cheery neighbor Allen begins to look blue, and says $600 isthe very most we can hope to collect of our salary, once $1, 200. "Again she writes, "I am already half sick from confinement to thehouse and overwork. If I should sew every day for a month to come Ishould not be able to accomplish half of what is to be done. " Therewere trials enough during this period, but her severest afflictioncame in its last year, in the loss of an infant son by cholera. Thatwas in 1849, when Cincinnati was devastated; when during the months ofJune, July and August more than nine thousand persons died of cholerawithin three miles of her house, and among them she says, "My Charley, my beautiful, loving, gladsome baby, so loving, so sweet, so full oflife and hope and strength. "

In these years, Mrs. Stowe's life was too full of domestic care topermit many excursions into the field of literature. In 1842, acollection of sketches was published by the Harpers under the title ofthe "Mayflower. " Occasionally she contributed a bright little story toa monthly or an annual. An amusing account is given of the writing ofone of these stories, by a lady who volunteered to serve as amanuensiswhile Mrs. Stowe dictated, and at the same time supervised a new girlin the kitchen: "You may now write, " said Mrs. Stowe, "'Her loverwept with her, nor dared he again touch the point so sacredlyguarded--(Mina, roll that crust a little thinner). He spoke insoothing tones. --(Mina, poke the coals). '"

These literary efforts, produced under difficulties, inspired Prof. Stowe with great confidence in her genius. He wrote her in 1842, "Mydear, you must be a literary woman. It is so written in the book offate. " Again he writes, "God has written it in his book that you mustbe a literary woman, and who are we that we should contend againstGod! You must therefore make all your calculations to spend the restof your life with your pen. " Nevertheless the next eight years pass asthe last six have passed without apparently bringing the dream of aliterary career nearer fulfilment. With a few strokes of the pen, Mrs. Stowe draws a picture of her life at this period: "I was married whenI was twenty-five years old to a man rich in Greek and Hebrew and, alas, rich in nothing else. .. . During long years of struggling withpoverty and sickness, and a hot, debilitating climate, my childrengrew up around me. The nursery and the kitchen were my principalfields of labor. Some of my friends, pitying my trials, copied andsent a number of little sketches from my pen to certain liberallypaying annuals, with my name. With the first money that I earned inthis way I bought a feather bed! for as I had married into poverty andwithout a dowry, and as my husband had only a large library of booksand a good deal of learning, the bed and pillows were thought the mostprofitable investment. After this I thought that I had discovered thephilosopher's stone. So when a new carpet or mattress was going to beneeded, or when at the close of the year it began to be evident thatmy family accounts, like poor Dora's, 'wouldn't add up, ' then I usedto say to my faithful friend and factotum Anna, who shared all my joysand sorrows, 'Now, if you will keep the babies and attend to things inthe house for a day, I'll write a piece and then we'll be out of thescrape. ' So I became an author, --very modest I do assure you. "

The hardships and privations of Mrs. Stowe's residence in Cincinnatiwere more than compensated to her by the opportunity it afforded forintimate acquaintance with the negro character and personalobservation of the institution of slavery. Only the breadth of theOhio river separated her from Kentucky, a slave State. While yet ateacher in the Female Institute, she spent a vacation upon a Kentuckyestate, afterward graphically described in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' as Col. Shelby's plantation. A companion upon this visit said, "Harriet didnot seem to notice anything in particular that happened. .. . Afterwards, in reading 'Uncle Tom, ' I recognized scene after scene ofthat visit portrayed with the most minute fidelity. " A dozen yearsbefore there were any similar demonstrations in Boston, she witnessedin 1838, proslavery riots in Cincinnati when Birney's Abolition presswas wrecked and when Henry Ward Beecher, then a young Cincinnatieditor, went armed to and from his office. She had had in her servicea slave girl whose master was searching the city for her, and whoserescue had been effected by Prof. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher who, "both armed, drove the fugitive, in a covered wagon, by night, byunfrequented roads, twelve miles back into the country, and left herin safety. " This incident was the basis of "the fugitive's escape fromTom Loker and Marks in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin. '"

Lane Theological Seminary, in which Prof. Stowe held a chair, had, itis said, "become a hot-bed of abolition. " Partly for protection, acolony of negroes had settled about the seminary, and these families, says Mrs. Stowe, "became my favorite resort in cases of emergency. Ifanyone wishes to have a black face look handsome, let them be left asI have been, in feeble health, in oppressive hot weather, with a sickbaby in arms, and two other ones in the nursery, and not a servant inthe whole house to do a turn. " "Time would fail me, " writes Mrs. Stowe, "to tell you all that I learned incidentally of the slavesystem in the history of various slaves who came into my family, andof the underground railroad which, I may say, ran through our house. "

A New England education alone would not have given Mrs. Stowe thematerial to write the story of "Uncle Tom. " A youth passed on aSouthern plantation would have made her callous and indifferent, as itdid so many tender-hearted women. A New England woman of genius, educated in New England traditions, was providentially transferred tothe heated border line between freedom and slavery and, duringeighteen years, made to hear a thousand authentic incidents of thepatriarchal system from the victims themselves. Then "Uncle Tom'sCabin" could be written. Perhaps one other element of preparationought to be mentioned since Mrs. Stowe laid stress upon it herself. The woman who should write "Uncle Tom's Cabin" needed to be a motherwho had known what it is to have a child snatched from her armsirrevocably and without a moment's notice. It was at her baby's "dyingbed and at his grave that I learned, " she says, "what a poor slavemother may feel when her child is torn away from her. In those depthsof sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only prayer toGod that such anguish might not be suffered in vain. .. . I allude tothis because I have often felt that much that is in that book ('UncleTom') had its roots in the awful scenes and bitter sorrows of thatsummer. "

In 1850, this western life, with its mixture of sweet and bitterwaters, came to an end. The climate of Cincinnati was unfavorable tothe health of both Mr. And Mrs. Stowe, and Mr. Stowe accepted aprofessorship in Bowdoin College, at the small salary of $1, 000 ayear, declining at the same time an offer from New York city of$2, 300. Why he accepted the smaller salary is not said. Certainly itassured him his old felicity, his Master's blessing upon the poor. Thesituation, however, was better than it seems, as Mrs. Stowe hadwritten enough to have confidence in her pen, and she purposed tomake the family income at least $1, 700 by her writings. Sheaccomplished much more than that as we shall presently see. 

From the car window, as one passes through Brunswick, Maine, he cansee the house in which Mrs. Stowe passed the three following veryhappy years, in which her seventh child was born, a son who lived tobe her biographer, and in which she wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin. " It willbe remembered that the year 1850 was made memorable by the enactmentof the Fugitive Slave Law. How the attempted execution of this lawaffected Mrs. Stowe can be anticipated. "To me, " she says, "it isincredible, amazing, mournful. I feel as if I should be willing tosink with it, were all this sin and misery to sink in the sea. .. . Isobbed, aloud in one pew and Mrs. Judge Reeves in another. "

In this mood, Mrs. Stowe received a letter from Mrs. Edward Beechersaying, "Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would writesomething to make this nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is. "Her children remember that at the reading of this letter, Mrs. Stowerose from her chair, crushing the letter in her hand, and said, "Iwill write something, --I will if I live. " The fulfilment of this vowwas "Uncle Tom's Cabin. "

This story was begun in _The National Era_, on June 5, 1851; it wasannounced to run through three months and it occupied ten. "I couldnot control the story, " said Mrs. Stowe; "it wrote itself. " Again, shesaid, "I the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin!' No, indeed. The Lordhimself wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand. "It has been said that "'Uncle Tom's Cabin' made the crack of theslave-driver's whip and the cries of the tortured blacks ring in everyhousehold in the land, till human hearts could bear it no longer, " andthat it "made the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law animpossibility. "

It is possible to discuss the question whether "Uncle Tom's Cabin" isa work of art, just as it is possible to discuss whether the Sermon onthe Mount is a work of art, but not whether the story was effective, not whether it hit the mark and accomplished its purpose. Mrs. Stowe'sstory is not so much one story as a dozen; in the discriminatinglanguage of her son, it is "a series of pictures, " and who will denythat the scenes are skilfully portrayed!

Mrs. Stowe did not know that she had made her fortune; she had notwritten for money; nevertheless when the story was republished in avolume, her ten per cent. Of the profits brought her $10, 000 in fourmonths. It went to its third edition in ten days, and one hundred andtwenty editions, or more than 300, 000 copies were sold in this countrywithin one year. This astounding popularity was exceeded in GreatBritain. Not being protected by copyright, eighteen publishing housesissued editions varying from 6d to 15s a copy, and in twelve months, more than a million and a half of copies had been sold in the Britishdominions. The book was also translated and published in nineteenEuropean languages. It was dramatized and brought out in New York in1852, and, a year later it was running still. "Everybody goes, " it wassaid, "night after night and nothing can stop it. " In London, in 1852, it was the attraction at two theatres. 

What the public thought of the story is evident, nor did competentjudges dissent. Longfellow said: "It is one of the greatest triumphsrecorded in literary history, to say nothing of the higher triumph ofits moral effect. " George Sand said: "Mrs. Stowe is all instinct; itis the very reason that she appears to some to have no talent. .. . Icannot say that she has talent as one understands it in the world ofletters, but she has genius as humanity feels the need of it, --thegenius of goodness, not that of the man of letters, but of thesaint. .. . In matters of art, there is but one rule, to paint and tomove. " I give but a paragraph of a paper which Senator Sumner called"a most remarkable tribute, such as was hardly ever offered by such agenius to any living mortal. "

Apologists for the slave system have declared that "Uncle Tom's Cabin"is a libel upon the system. One must do that before he can begin hisapology; but the remarkable fact is that not even in the South was thelibel detected at the first. That was an after-thought. Whittier knewa lady who read the story "to some twenty young ladies, daughters ofslave-holders, near New Orleans and amid the scenes described in it, and they with one accord pronounced it true. " It was not till the saleof the book had run to over 100, 000 copies that a reaction set in andthen, strange to say, the note of warning was sounded by thatinfallible authority upon American affairs, the London Times. 

In 1852, the year following the publication of "Uncle Tom" Prof. Stoweaccepted a chair in the Theological Seminary at Andover, and thatvillage became the home of the family during the ten following happyyears. In 1853, Mr. And Mrs. Stowe went to England upon the invitationof Anti-Slavery friends who guaranteed and considerably overpaid theexpenses of the trip. "Should Mrs. Stowe conclude to visit Europe, "wrote Senator Sumner, "she will have a triumph. " The prediction wasfulfilled. At Liverpool she is met by friends and breakfasted with alittle company of thirty or forty people; at Glasgow, she drinks teawith two thousand; at Edinburgh there was "another great tea party, "and she was presented with a "national penny offering consisting of athousand golden sovereigns on a magnificent silver salver. " She hadthe Highlands yet to see as the guest of the Duke of Argyll, not tomention London and Paris. After five months, she sailed from Liverpoolon her return, and is it any wonder that she wrote, "Almost sadly as achild might leave its home, I left the shores of kind, strong OldEngland, the mother of us all!"

In 1856, Mrs. Stowe visited Europe a second time for the purpose ofsecuring an English copyright upon "Dred, " having learned something ofbusiness by her experience with "Uncle Tom. " It will be interestingto know that in England "Dred" was considered the better story, that100, 000 copies of it were sold there in four weeks, and that herEnglish publisher issued it in editions of 125, 000 copies each. "Afterthat, " writes Mrs. Stowe, "who cares what the critics say?"

She was abroad nearly a year, visiting France, Switzerland, and Italy, and returned in June, 1857, to experience another sad bereavement. Herson Henry was a Freshman in Dartmouth college and, while bathing inthe Connecticut river, he was drowned. This was a severe trial to Mrs. Stowe and the more so because, whatever her religion may have done forher, the theology in which she had been educated gave no comfort toher soul. "Distressing doubts as to Henry's spiritual state wererudely thrust upon my soul. " These doubts she was able to master atleast temporarily, by assuming that they were temptations of thedevil, but three years later in Florence, on a third voyage to Europe, she wrote her husband, in reply to his allusions to Henry, "Since Ihave been in Florence, I have been distressed by inexpressibleyearnings for him, --such sighings and outreachings, with a sense ofutter darkness and separation, not only from him but from allspiritual communion with my God. " It will be interesting to know thatrelief was brought her in this painful crisis, by the ministrations ofspiritualism. 

Mrs. Stowe returned in 1860 from her third visit to Europe to find thecountry hovering upon the verge of Civil War. The war brought heranother sore bereavement. At the battle of Gettysburg, her son, Capt. Frederick Stowe, was struck by the fragment of a shell and, though thewound healed, he never really recovered. His end was sufficientlytragic. With the hope of improving his health by a long sea voyage, hesailed from New York for San Francisco by way of Cape Horn. That hereached San Francisco in safety, writes his brother, "is known: butthat is all. No word from him or concerning him has ever reached theloving hearts that have waited so anxiously for it, and of hisultimate fate nothing is known. " Whatever may have been the "spiritualstate" of this son, Mrs. Stowe had now somewhat modernized hertheology and could say, "An endless infliction for past sins was oncethe doctrine that we now generally reject. .. . Of one thing I amsure, --probation does not end with this life. " To stamp out that veryheresy had been no small part of Dr. Beecher's mission in Boston. 

In 1863, Prof. Stowe having resigned his chair in Andover, Mrs. Stoweremoved with her family to Hartford where for the remainingthirty-three years of her life, she made her summer home. The winterof 1866, she spent with her husband in Florida and, the yearfollowing, she bought in that semi-tropical state an orange orchard, the fruit of which the year previous had "brought $2, 000 as sold atthe wharf. " Here for sixteen winters Mr. And Mrs. Stowe made theirhome, until her "poor rabbi, " as she affectionately calls him, becametoo feeble to bear the long journey from Hartford. There she built asmall Episcopal church and she invites her brother Charles to becomean Episcopalian and come and be her minister. 

Her son says that "Mrs. Stowe had some years before this joined theEpiscopal church for the purpose of attending the same communion asher daughters. " That she desired to attend the same communion as herdaughters does not seem a sufficient reason for leaving the communionof her husband. Certainly, she had other reasons. From her fourthyear, she had known the service and, as read by her grandmother atthat time, its prayers "had a different effect upon me, " she says, "from any other prayers I heard in early life. " Moreover, she had amission to the negro race and believed that the Episcopal service isspecially adapted to their needs: "If my tasks and feelings did notincline me toward the Church, " she writes her brother, "I should stillchoose it as the best system for training immature minds such as thoseof our negroes. The system was composed with reference to the wants ofthe laboring class of England, at a time when they were as ignorant asour negroes are now. "

The picture of her southern life which she gives in a letter to GeorgeEliot, is very attractive, her husband "sitting on the veranda readingall day, " but during these years, Mrs. Stowe must have spent much ofher own time at a writing-table since, for the ten years after 1867, when the Florida life began, she published a volume, sometimes twovolumes, a year. In 1872, she was tempted by the Boston Lecture Bureauto give readings from her own works in the principal cities of NewEngland, and the following year, the course was repeated in the citiesof the West. Her audiences were to her amazing. "And how they dolaugh! We get into regular gales, " she writes her lonely husband athome. 

Her seventieth birthday was celebrated at a gathering of two hundredof the leading literary men and women of the land, at the residence ofEx-Governor Claflin in Newton. There were poems by Whittier, Dr. Holmes, J. T. Trowbridge, Mrs. Whitney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mrs. Fields, and others, many excellent speeches, and finally a speech bythe little woman herself. This garden party, says her son, was thelast public appearance of Mrs. Stowe. 

Her "rabbi" left her a widow in 1886, dying at the age of 84. Mrs. Stowe survived him ten years, dying in 1896, at the age of 85, leavingbehind her a name loved and honored upon two continents. 

VII

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

[Illustration: LOUISA MAY ALCOTT]

Miss Alcott has been called, perhaps truly, the most popularstory-teller for children, in her generation. Like those elect soulswhom the apostle saw arrayed in white robes, she came up through greattribulation, paying dearly in labor and privation for her successes, but one must pronounce her life happy and fortunate, since she livedto enjoy her fame and fortune twenty years, to witness the sale of amillion volumes of her writings, to receive more than two hundredthousand dollars from her publishers, and thereby to accomplish thegreat purpose upon which as a girl she had set her heart, which was, to see her father and mother comfortable in their declining years. 

Successful as Miss Alcott was as a writer, she was greater as a woman, and the story of her life is as interesting, --as full of tragedy andcomedy, --as the careers of her heroes and heroines. In fact, we havereason to believe that the adventures of her characters are often notso much invented as remembered, the pranks and frolics of her boysand girls being episodes from her own youthful experience. In thepreface to "Little Women, " the most charming of her books, she tellsus herself that the most improbable incidents are the least imaginary. The happy girlhood which she portrays was her own, in spite offorbidding conditions. The struggle in which her cheerful natureextorted happiness from unwilling fortune, gives a dramatic interestto her youthful experiences, as her literary disappointments andsuccesses do to the years of her maturity. 

Miss Alcott inherited a name which her father's genius had made knownon both sides of the sea, before her own made it famous in a hundredthousand households. Alcott is a derivative from Alcocke, the name bywhich Mr. Alcott himself was known in his boyhood. John Alcocke, bornin New Haven, Ct. , married Mary, daughter of Rev. Abraham Pierson, first president of Yale College. He was a man of considerable fortuneand left 1, 200 acres of land to his six children, one of whom wasCapt. John Alcocke, a man of some distinction in the colonial service. Joseph Chatfield Alcocke, son of Capt. John, married Anna, sister ofRev. Tillotson Bronson, D. D. Of this marriage, Amos Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa, was born, Nov. 29, 1799. The fortunes of JosephChatfield Alcocke were those of other small farmers of the period, butMrs. Alcocke could not forget that she was the sister of a collegegraduate, and it was worth something to her son to know that he wasdescended from the president of a college. The mother and son earlysettled it that the boy should be a scholar, and the father loyallyfurthered their ambitions, borrowing of his acquaintances such booksas he discovered and bringing them home for the delectation of hisstudious son. At the age of thirteen, Bronson became a pupil in aprivate school kept by his uncle, Dr. Bronson, and at eighteen, he setout for Virginia with the secret purpose of teaching if opportunityoffered, at the same time taking along a peddler's trunk out of whichto turn an honest penny and pay the expenses of his journey. Circumstances did not favor his becoming a Virginia teacher, butbetween his eighteenth and twenty-third years, he made severalexpeditions into the Southern States as a Yankee peddler, with rathernegative financial results, but with much enlargement of hisinformation and improvement of his rustic manners. Mr. Alcott wasrather distinguished for his high-bred manners and, on a visit toEngland, there is an amusing incident of his having been mistaken forsome member of the titled aristocracy. 

At the age of twenty-five, Mr. Alcott began his career as a teacher inan Episcopal Academy at Cheshire, Ct. His family were Episcopalians, and he had been confirmed at sixteen. Since the age of eighteen whenhe started for Virginia as a candidate for a school, he had beentheorizing upon the art of teaching and had thought out many of theprinciples of what, a century later, began to be called the "NewEducation. " He undertook, perhaps too rapidly, to apply his theoriesin the conduct of the Cheshire Academy. His experiments occasioned avast amount of controversy, in which Connecticut conservatism gained avictory, and Mr. Alcott retired from the school at the end of twoyears' service. His results however had been sufficient to convincehim of the soundness of his principles, and to launch him upon thetroubled career of educational reform. 

Among a few intelligent friends and sympathizers who rallied to Mr. Alcott's side in this controversy, was Rev. Samuel J. May, a Unitarianminister then of Brooklyn, Ct. , at whose house, in 1827, Mr. Alcottmet Mr. May's sister Abbie, who shared fully her brother's enthusiasmfor the new education and its persecuted apostle. Miss May began herrelations with Mr. Alcott as his admirer and champion, a dangerouspart for an enthusiastic young lady to play, as the sequel provedwhen, three years later, she became Mrs. Alcott. 

Mrs. Alcott was the daughter of a Boston merchant, Col. Joseph May, and his wife, Dorothy Sewall, daughter of Samuel Sewall and his wife, Elizabeth Quincy, sister of Dorothy Quincy, wife of John Hancock. Bythe marriage of Joseph May and Dorothy Sewall, two very distinguishedlines of ancestry had been united. Under her father's roof, Mrs. Alcott had enjoyed every comfort and the best of social advantages. She was tall, had a fine physique, good intellect, warm affections, and generous sympathies, but it would have astonished her to have beentold that she was bringing to the marriage altar more than shereceived; and however much it may have cost her to be the wife of anunworldly idealist, it was precisely his unworldly idealism that firstwon her admiration and then gained her heart. 

Life may have been harder for Mrs. Alcott than she anticipated, butshe knew very well that she was abjuring riches. Two years before hermarriage, her brother had written her: "Mr. Alcott's mind and heartare so much occupied with other things that poverty and riches do notseem to concern him much. " She had known Mr. Alcott three years andhad enjoyed ample opportunity to make this observation herself. Indeed, two months after her marriage, she wrote her brother, "Myhusband is the perfect personification of modesty and moderation. I amnot sure that we shall not blush into obscurity and contemplate intostarvation. " That she had not repented of her choice a year later, maybe judged from a letter to her brother on the first anniversary of hermarriage: "It has been an eventful year, --a year of trial, ofhappiness, of improvement. I can wish no better fate to any sister ofmy sex than has attended me since my entrance into the conjugalstate. "

That Mr. Alcott, then in his young manhood, had qualities which, for ayoung lady of refinement and culture, would compensate for manyprivations is evident. Whether he was one of the great men of hisgeneration or not, there is no doubt he seemed so. When, in 1837, Dr. Bartol came to Boston, Mr. Emerson asked him whom he knew in thecity, and said: "There is but one man, Mr. Alcott. " Dr. Bartol seemsto have come to much the same opinion. He says: "Alcott belonged tothe Christ class: his manners were the most gentle and gracious, underall fair or unfair provocation, I ever beheld; he had a rare inbornpiety and a god-like incapacity in the purity of his eyes to beholdiniquity. "

These qualities were not visible to the public and have no commercialvalue, but that Mr. Alcott had them is confirmed by the beautifuldomestic life of the Alcotts, by the unabated love and devotion ofMrs. Alcott to her husband in all trials, and the always high andalways loyal appreciation with which Louisa speaks of her father, evenwhen perhaps smiling at his innocent illusions. The character of Mr. Alcott is an important element in the life of Louisa because she washis daughter, and because, being unmarried, her life and fortunes werehis, or those of the Alcott family. She had no individual existence. 

Two years after the marriage of Mr. And Mrs. Alcott, Louisa, theirsecond daughter was born in Germantown, Pa. , where Mr. Alcott was incharge of a school belonging to the Society of Friends, or Quakers. The date was November 29, 1832, also Mr. Alcott's birthday, alwaysobserved as a double festival in the family. In 1834, Mr. Alcottopened his celebrated school in Masonic Temple in Boston, Mass. , underthe auspices of Dr. Channing and with the assured patronage of some ofthe most cultivated and influential families in the city. Asassistants in this school, he had first Miss Sophia Peabody afterwardMrs. Hawthorne, her sister Miss Elizabeth Peabody, and finallyMargaret Fuller. 

The school opened prosperously and achieved remarkable success until, in 1837, the publication of Mr. Alcott's "Conversations on theGospels" shocked the piety of Boston newspapers, whose persistent andvirulent attacks frightened the public and caused the withdrawal oftwo-thirds of the pupils. Mr. Emerson came to Mr. Alcott's defence, saying: "He is making an experiment in which all the friends ofeducation are interested, " and asking, "whether it be wise or just toadd to the anxieties of this enterprise a public clamor against somedetached sentences of a book which, on the whole, is pervaded byoriginal thought and sincere piety. " In a private note, Mr. Emersonurged Mr. Alcott to give up his school, as the people of Boston werenot worthy of him. Mr. Alcott had spent more than the income of theschool in its equipment, creating debts which Louisa afterward paid;all his educational ideals were at stake, and he could not acceptdefeat easily. However, in 1839, a colored girl was admitted to theschool, and all his pupils were withdrawn, except the little negressand four whites, three of whom were his own daughters. So ended theTemple school. The event was very fateful for the Alcott family, but, much as it concerned Mrs. Alcott, there can be no doubt she muchpreferred that the school should end thus, than that Mr. Alcott shouldyield to public clamor on either of the issues which wrecked theenterprise. 

Louisa was seven years old when this misfortune occurred which shapedthe rest of her life, fixing the straitened circumstances in which shewas to pass her youth and preparing the burdens which ultimately wereto be lifted by her facile pen. Happily the little Alcotts, of whomthere were three, were too young to feel the perplexities thatharassed their parents and their early years could hardly have beenpassed more pleasantly or profitably if they had been the daughters ofmillionaires. The family lived very comfortably amidst a fine circleof relatives and friends in Boston, preached and practised avegetarian gospel, --rice without sugar and graham meal without butteror molasses, --monotonous but wholesome, spent their summers withfriends at Scituate and, in town or country, partly owing to theprinciples of the new education, partly to the preoccupation of theparents, the children of the family were left in large measure to theteaching of nature and their own experience. 

Very abundant moral instruction there was in this apostolic family, both by example and precept, but the young disciples were expected tomake their own application of the principles. The result, in the caseof Louisa, was to develop a girl of very enterprising and adventurouscharacter, who might have been mistaken for a boy from her sun-burnedface, vigorous health, and abounding animal spirits. It was her prideto drive her hoop around the Common before breakfast and she tells usthat she admitted to her social circle no girl who could not climb atree and no boy whom she had not beaten in a race. Her autobiographyof this period, she has given us, very thinly disguised, in "Poppy'sPranks. "

Meanwhile, her mental faculties were not neglected. Mr. Alcott beganthe education of his children, in a kindergarten way, almost in theirinfancy, and before his Boston school closed, Louisa had two or threeyears in it as a pupil. What his method of education could do with achild of eight years is shown by a poem written by Louisa at that age. The family were then living in Concord, in the house which, in "LittleWomen, " is celebrated as "Meg's first home. " One early Spring day, Louisa found in the garden a robin, chilled and famished, and wrotethese lines:

 "Welcome, welcome, little stranger, Fear no harm, and fear no danger; We are glad to see you here, For you sing, Sweet Spring is near. 

 Now the white snow melts away; Now the flowers blossom gay: Come, dear bird, and build your nest, For we love our robin best. "

It will be remembered that this literary faculty, unusual at the ageof eight, had been attained by a girl in the physical condition of anathlete, who could climb a tree like a squirrel. 

Readers of "Little Women" will remember what a child's paradise "Meg'sfirst home" was, with its garden full of fruit-trees and shade, andits old empty barn which the children alternately turned into adrawing-room for company, a gymnasium for romps, and a theatre fordramatic performances. "There, " says Louisa, "we dramatized the fairytales in great style, " Jack the Giant-killer and Cinderella beingfavorites, the passion for the stage which came near making Louisa anactress, as also her sister Anna, getting early development. 

The fun and frolic of these days were the more enjoyed because theyalternated with regular duties, with lessons in housework with themother and language lessons with the father, for which he now hadabundant leisure. As he had no other pupils, he could try all hiseducational experiments in his own family. Among other exercises, thechildren were required to keep a journal, to write in it regularly, and to submit it to the examination and criticism of the parents. Facility in writing thus became an early acquisition. It was furtheredby a pretty habit which Mrs. Alcott had of keeping up a littlecorrespondence with her children, writing little notes to them whenshe had anything to say in the way of reproof, correction, orinstruction, receiving their confessions, repentance, and goodresolutions by the next mail. 

Some of these maternal letters are very tender and beautiful. One toLouisa at the age of eleven, enclosed a picture of a frail mothercared for by a faithful daughter, and says, "I have always liked itvery much, for I imagined that you might be just such an industriousdaughter and I such a feeble and loving mother, looking to your laborfor my daily bread. " There was prophecy in this and there was moreprophecy in the lines with which Louisa replied:

 "I hope that soon, dear mother, You and I may be In the quiet room my fancy Has so often made for thee, --

 The pleasant, sunny chamber, The cushioned easy-chair, The book laid for your reading, The vase of flowers fair;

 The desk beside the window When the sun shines warm and bright, And there in ease and quiet, The promised book you write. 

 While I sit close beside you, Content at last to see That you can rest, dear mother, And I can cherish thee. "

The versification is still juvenile, but there is no fault in thesentiment, and Miss Alcott, in a later note, says, "The dream cametrue, and for the last ten years of her life, Marmee sat in peace withevery wish granted. "

Evidently Louisa had begun to feel the pinch of the familycircumstances. The income was of the slenderest. Sometimes Mr. Alcottgave a lecture or "conversation" and received a few dollars; sometimeshe did a day's farm work for a neighbor; now and then Mr. Emersoncalled and clandestinely left a bank note, and many valuable packagescame out from relatives in Boston; but frugal housekeeping was thechief asset of the family. Discouraging as the outlook was, somebitter experience might have been escaped if the Alcotts had remainedin Concord, pursuing their unambitious career. It was, however, theera of social experiments in New England. The famous Brook Farmcommunity was then in the third year of its existence, and it wasimpossible that Mr. Alcott should not sympathize with this effort toease the burden of life, and wish to try his own experiment. Therefore, in 1843, being joined by several English socialists, one ofwhom financed the undertaking, Mr. Alcott started a small community ona worn-out not to say abandoned farm, which was hopefully christened"Fruitlands. "

Visiting the community five or six weeks after its inception, Mr. Emerson wrote: "The sun and the evening sky do not look calmer thanAlcott and his family at Fruitlands. They seem to have arrived at thefact, --to have got rid of the show, and so to be serene. They lookwell in July; we will see them in December. " An inhospitable Decembercame upon the promising experiment, as it generally has upon allsimilar enterprises. Under the title Transcendental Wild Oats, in"Silver Pitchers, " Miss Alcott gives a lively account of the varyinghumors of this disastrous adventure. 

Whatever disappointments and privations the enterprise had in storefor their parents, the situation, with its little daily bustle, itslimitless range of fields and woods, its flower hunting and berrypicking, was full of interest and charm for four healthy children allunder the age of twelve years. The fateful December, to which Mr. Emerson postponed his judgment, had not come before the elders weredebating a dissolution of the community. "Father asked us if we sawany reason for us to separate, " writes Louisa in her journal. "Motherwanted to, she is so tired. I like it. " Of course she did; but "notthe school part, " she adds, "nor Mr. L. ", who was one of her teachers. The inevitable lessons interfered with her proper business. 

"Fruitlands" continued for three years with declining fortunes, itslack of promise being perhaps a benefit to the family in saving forother purposes a small legacy which Mrs. Alcott received from herfather's estate. With this and a loan of $500 from Mr. Emerson, shebought "The Hillside" in Concord, an estate which, after the Alcotts, was occupied by Mr. Hawthorne. Thither Mrs. Alcott removed with herfamily in 1846, and the two years that followed is the period whichLouisa looked back upon as the happiest of her life, "for we had, " shesays, "charming playmates in the little Emersons, Channings, Hawthornes, and Goodwins, with the illustrious parents and theirfriends to enjoy our pranks and share our excursions. " Here the happygirlish life was passed which is so charmingly depicted in "LittleWomen, " and here at the age of sixteen, Louisa wrote, for theentertainment of the little Alcotts and Emersons, a series of prettyfairy tales, still to be read in the second volume of Lulu's Library. 

Much as there was to enjoy in these surroundings, the problem ofsubsistence had not been solved and, with the growth of her daughterstoward womanhood, it became more difficult for Mrs. Alcott. The worldhad, apparently, no use for Mr. Alcott; there were six persons to befed and clothed, and no bread-winner in the family. The story is thatone day, a friend found her in tears and demanded an explanation. "Abby Alcott, what does this mean?" asked the visitor, and when Mrs. Alcott had made her confessions, her friend said, "Come to Boston andI will find you employment. "

Accepting the proposition, the family removed to Boston in 1848, andMrs. Alcott became the agent of certain benevolent societies. Mr. Alcott taught private classes, or held "conversations"; the olderdaughters, Anna and Louisa, found employment; and we may think of thefamily as fairly comfortable during the seven or eight years of itslife in Boston. "Our poor little home, " says Miss Alcott, "had muchlove and happiness in it, and was a shelter for lost girls, abusedwives, friendless children, and weak and wicked men. Father and motherhad no money to give but they gave time, sympathy, help; and ifblessings would make them rich, they would be millionaires. " Fugitiveslaves were among the homeless who found shelter, one of whom Mrs. Alcott concealed in an unused brick oven. 

In Miss Alcott's journal of this period, we find the burden ofexistence weighing very heavily upon her, a state of mind apparentlyinduced by her first experience in teaching. "School is hard work, "she says, "and I feel as though I should like to run away from it. Butmy children get on; so I travel up every day and do my best. I getvery little time to write or think, for my working days have begun. "Later, she seems to have seen the value of this experience. "Atsixteen, " she writes, "I began to teach twenty pupils and, for tenyears, I learned to know and love children. "

Amateur theatricals were still the recreation of the Alcott girls, asthey had been almost from infancy, and the stage presented afascinating alternative to the school-room. "Anna wants to be anactress and so do I, " writes Louisa at seventeen. "We could makeplenty of money perhaps, and it is a very gay life. Mother says we aretoo young and must wait. Anna acts splendidly. I like tragic plays andshall be a Siddons if I can. We get up harps, dresses, water-falls, and thunder, and have great fun. " Both of the sisters wrote manyexciting dramas at this period, and one of Louisa's, "The Rival PrimaDonnas, " was accepted by the manager of the Boston Theatre, who"thought it would have a fine run" and sent the author a free pass tothe theatre, which partly compensated for the non-appearance of theplay. Some years later, a farce written by Louisa, "Nat Bachelor'sPleasure Trip, or the Trials of a Good-Natured Man, " was produced atthe Howard Athenĉum, and was favorably received. Christie's experienceas an actress, in Miss Alcott's novel entitled, "Work, " is imaginaryin its incidents, but autobiographical in its spirit. 

All these experiments in dramatic literature, from Jack theGiant-Killer on, were training the future story-teller. Miss Alcott'sfirst story to see the light was printed in a newspaper at the age oftwenty, in 1852, though it had been written at sixteen. She received$5. 00 for it, and the event is interesting as the beginning of herfortune. This little encouragement came at a period of considerabletrial for the family. The following is from her journal of 1853: "InJanuary, I started a little school of about a dozen in our parlor. InMay, my school closed and I went to L. As second girl. I needed thechange, could do the wash, and was glad to earn my $2. 00 a week. "Notice that this is her summer vacation. "Home in October with $34. 00for my wages. After two days' rest, began school again with tenchildren. " The family distributed themselves as follows: "Anna went toSyracuse to teach; father to the west to try his luck, --so poor, sohopeful, so serene. God be with him. Mother had several boarders. School for me, month after month. I earned a good deal by sewing inthe evening when my day's work was done. "

Mr. Alcott returned from the west, and the account of his adventuresis very touching: "In February father came home. Paid his way, but nomore. A dramatic scene when he arrived in the night. We were awakenedby the bell. Mother flew down crying, My Husband. We rushed after andfive white figures embraced the half-frozen wanderer who came in, hungry, tired, cold, and disappointed, but smiling bravely and asserene as ever. We fed and warmed and brooded over him, longing to askif he had made any money; but no one did till little May said, afterhe had told us all the pleasant things, 'Well, did people pay you?'Then with a queer look he opened his pocket book, and showed onedollar, saying with a smile, 'Only that. My overcoat was stolen, and Ihad to buy a shawl. Many promises were not kept, and traveling iscostly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better. 'I shall never forget how beautifully mother answered him, though thedear, hopeful soul had built much on his success: but with a beamingface she kissed him, saying, 'I call that doing very well. Since youare safely home, dear, we don't ask anything else. '"

One of Miss Alcott's unfulfilled purposes was to write a storyentitled "The Pathetic Family. " This passage would have found a placein it. It deserves to be said that Mr. Alcott's faith that he had"opened a way and another year should do better, " was justified. Fifteen years later, from one of his western tours, he brought home$700, but, thanks to Louisa's pen, the family were no longer in suchdesperate need of money. 

More than once Miss Alcott declares that no one ever assisted her inher struggles, but that was far from true, as appears from many favorsacknowledged in her journal. It was by the kindness of a lady whobought the manuscripts and assumed the risk of publication, that herfirst book, "Flower Fables, " was brought out in 1854. It consisted ofthe fairy tales written six years before for the little Emersons. Shereceived $32. 00, a sum which would have seemed insignificant thirtyyears later when, in 1886, the sale of her books for six monthsbrought her $8, 000; but she says, "I was prouder over the $32. 00 thanover the $8, 000. "

The picture of Jo in a garret in "Little Women, " planning and writingstories, is drawn from Louisa's experiences of the following winter. Afrequent entry in her journal for this period is "$5. 00 for a story"and her winter's earnings are summed up, "school, one quarter, $50, sewing $50, stories, $20. " In December we read, "Got five dollars fora tale and twelve for sewing. " Teaching, writing, and sewing alternatein her life for the next five years, and, for a year or two yet, theneedle is mightier than the pen; but in 1856, she began to be paid $10for a story, and, in 1859, the _Atlantic_ accepted a story and paidher $50. 

A friend for whose encouragement during these hard years, sheacknowledges great indebtedness and who appears as one of thecharacters in her story, entitled "Work, " was Rev. Theodore Parker, aman as helpful, loving, and gentle as she depicts him, but then muchhated by those called orthodox and hardly in good standing among hisUnitarian brethren. Miss Alcott, then as ever, had the courage of herconvictions, was a member of his Music Hall congregation, and aregular attendant at his Sunday evening receptions, finding him "veryfriendly to the large, bashful girl who adorns his parlor regularly. "She "fought for him, " she says, when some one said Mr. Parker "was nota Christian. He is my sort; for though he may lack reverence for otherpeople's God, he works bravely for his own, and turns his back on noone who needs help, as some of the pious do. " After Mr. Parker'sdeath, Miss Alcott, when in Boston, attended the church of Dr. C. A. Bartol, who buried her mother, her father and herself. 

In 1857, the Alcotts returned to Concord, buying and occupying theOrchard House, which thenceforth became their home. Other familyevents of the period were, the death of Miss Alcott's sisterElizabeth, Beth in "Little Women, " the marriage of Anna, Meg in"Little Women, " and a proposal of marriage to Louisa, serious enoughfor her to hold a consultation over it with her mother. Miss Alcott issaid to have been averse to entangling alliances for herself, to havemarried off the heroines in her novels reluctantly at the demand ofher readers, and never to have enjoyed writing the necessarylove-passages. 

The year 1860, when Miss Alcott is twenty-seven, has the distinctionof being marked in the heading of her journal as "A Year of GoodLuck. " Her family had attained a comfortable, settled home in Concord;Mr. Alcott had been appointed superintendent of public schools, anoffice for which he was peculiarly well qualified and in which he wasboth happy and admirably successful; Anna, the eldest sister, washappily married; May, the youngest, was making a reputation as anartist; and Louisa, in perfect health, having in May before, "walkedto Boston, twenty miles, in five hours, and attended an eveningparty, " was becoming a regular contributor to the _Atlantic_, andreceiving $50, $75, and sometimes $100 for her stories. 

In these happy conditions, Miss Alcott sat down to a more ambitiousattempt at authorship and wrote the first rough draft of "Moods, " a"problem novel" that provoked much discussion and, though it causedher more trouble than any other of her books, was always dearest toher heart. It was written in a kind of frenzy of poetic enthusiasm. "Genius burned so fiercely, " she says, "that for four weeks, I wroteall day and planned nearly all night, being quite possessed by mywork. I was perfectly happy, and seemed to have no wants. Finished thebook, or a rough draft of it, and put it away to settle. " It was notpublished till four years later. Even in this year of good luck, thereseem to have been some privations, as she records being invited toattend a John Brown meeting and declining because she "had no goodgown. " She sends a poem instead. 

The breaking out of the Civil War stirred Miss Alcott's soul to itsdepths, and we have numerous references to its progress in herjournal. "I like the stir in the air, " she writes, "and long forbattle like a war-horse when he smells powder. " Not being permitted toenlist as a soldier, she went into a hospital in Washington as anurse. Her experiences are graphically and dramatically told in"Hospital Sketches. " That book, chiefly made from her private letters, met the demand of the public, eager for any information about thegreat war; it was widely read and, besides putting $200 in her purse, gave her a reputation with readers and publishers. Many applicationsfor manuscript came in and she was told that "any publisher this sideof Baltimore would be glad to get a book" from her. "There is a suddenhoist, " she says, "for a meek and lowly scribbler. Fifteen years ofhard grubbing may come to something yet. " Her receipts for the year1863, amounted to $600 and she takes comfort in saying that she hadspent less than one hundred on herself. 

The following year, after having been twice re-written, "Moods" wasbrought out and, thanks to the "Hospital Sketches, " had a ready sale. Wherever she went, she says, she "found people laughing or crying overit, and was continually told how well it was going, how much it wasliked, how fine a thing I had done. " The first edition was exhaustedin a week. An entire edition was ordered by London publishers. She wasvery well satisfied with the reception of "Moods" at the time, thoughin after years when fifty thousand copies of a book would be printedas a first edition, the sale of "Moods" seemed to her inconsiderable. 

The present day reader wonders neither at the eagerness of the publicfor the book, nor at the criticisms that were freely made upon it. Itis interesting from cover to cover and as a study of "a life affectedby moods, not a discussion of marriage, " it is effective. In spite, however, of the warning of the author, everyone read it as "adiscussion of marriage, " and few were satisfied. The interest centresin the fortunes of a girl who has married the wrong lover, the man towhom, by preference, she would have given her heart being supposed tobe dead. Would that he had been, for then, to all appearance, shewould have been contented and happy. Unfortunately he returns a yeartoo late, finds the girl married and, though endowed with every virtuewhich a novelist can bestow upon her hero, he does not know enough toleave the poor woman in peace. On the contrary, he settles down to adeliberate siege to find out how she feels, wrings from her theconfession that she is miserable, as by that time no doubt she was, and then convinces her that since she does not love her husband, it isaltogether wrong to live under the same roof with him. Surely this wasnobly done. Poor Sylvia loves this villain, Miss Alcott evidentlyloves him, but the bloody-minded reader would like to thrust a knifeinto him. However, he is not a name or a type, but a real man, or onecould not get so angry with him. All the characters live and breathein these pages, and no criticism was less to the purpose than thatthe situations were unnatural. Miss Alcott says "The relations ofWarwick, Moor, and Sylvia are pronounced impossible; yet a case of thesort exists, and a woman came and asked me how I knew it. I did notknow or guess, but perhaps felt it, without any other guide, andunconsciously put the thing into my book. "

Everyone will agree that Miss Alcott had earned a vacation, and itcame in 1865, in a trip to Europe, where she spent a year, from Julyto July, as the companion of an invalid lady, going abroad for health. The necessity of modulating her pace to the movements of a nervousinvalid involved some discomforts for a person of Miss Alcott'spedestrian abilities, but who would not accept some discomforts for ayear of European travel? She had a reading knowledge of German andFrench, and in the abundant leisure which the long rests of herinvalid friend forced upon her, she learned to speak French withfacility. 

On her return from Europe, she found her circumstances much improved. She had established her position as a regular contributer to the_Atlantic_ whose editor, she says, "takes all I'll send. " In 1868, she was offered and accepted the editorship of _Merry's Museum_ at asalary of $500, and, more important, she was asked by Roberts Brothersto "write a girl's book. " Her response to this proposition was "LittleWomen, " which she calls "the first golden egg of the ugly duckling, for the copyright made her fortune. " Two editions were exhausted insix weeks and the book was translated into French, German and Dutch. 

"Little Men" was written, a chapter a day, in November of the sameyear, and "An Old-fashioned Girl, " a popular favorite, the yearfollowing. "Hospital Sketches" had not yet outlived its welcome, wasrepublished, with some additions, in 1869, and two thousand copieswere sold the first week. She is able to say, "Paid up all debts, thank the Lord, every penny that money can pay, --and now I feel as ifI could die in peace. " Besides, she has invested "$1, 200 for a rainyday, " and is annoyed because "people come and stare at the Alcotts. Reporters haunt the place to look at the authoress, who dodges intothe woods. "

The severe application which her achievement had cost had impairedMiss Alcott's fine constitution and, in 1870, taking May, her artistsister, she made a second trip to Europe, spending the summer inFrance and Switzerland and the winter in Rome. A charming account ofthe adventures of this expedition is given in "Shawl-Straps. " Apleasant incident of the journey was the receipt of a statement fromher publisher giving her credit for $6, 212, and she is able to saythat she has "$10, 000 well invested and more coming in all the time, "and that she thinks "we may venture to enjoy ourselves, after the hardtimes we have had. "

In 1872, she published "Work: a story of Experience, " and it is forthe most part, a story of her own experience. "Christie's adventures, "she says, "are many of them my own: Mr. Power is Mr. Parker: Mrs. Wilkins is imaginary, and all the rest. This was begun at eighteen, and never finished till H. W. Beecher wrote me for a serial for the_Christian Union_ and paid $3, 000 for it. " It is one of the mostdeservedly popular of her books. 

In 1877, for Roberts Brothers' "No Name Series, " Miss Alcott wrote "AModern Mephistopheles, " her least agreeable book, but original, imaginative, and powerful. The moral of the story is that, in ourmodern life, the devil does not appear with a cloven foot, but as acultivated man of the world. Miss Alcott's Mephistopheles is evencapable of generous impulses. With the kindness of a Good Samaritan, he saves a poor wretch from suicide and then destroys him morally. Thedevil is apparently a mixed character with a decided preponderance ofsinfulness. 

Miss Alcott had now reached her forty-fifth year, had placed herfamily in independent circumstances, thus achieving her earlyambition, and the effort began to tell upon her health. A successionof rapid changes soon came upon her. Mrs. Alcott, having attained herseventy-seventh year, was very comfortable for her age. "Mother iscosy with her sewing, letters, and the success of her 'girls, '" writesMiss Alcott in January; but in June, "Marmee grows more and morefeeble, " and in November the end came. "She fell asleep in my arms, "writes Louisa; "My duty is done, and now I shall be glad to followher. "

May, the talented artist sister, whom Louisa had educated, had oncetaken to Europe and twice sent abroad for study, was married in Londonin 1878, to a Swiss gentleman of good family and some fortune, Mr. Nieriker. The marriage was a very happy one but the joy of the youngwife was brief. She died the year following, leaving an infantdaughter as a legacy to Louisa. 

Mr. Emerson's death in 1882, was, to her, much like taking a member ofher own family: "The nearest and dearest friend father ever had andthe man who helped me most by his life, his books, his society. I cannever tell all he has been to me, --from the time I sang Mignon's songunder his window (a little girl) and wrote letters _a la Bettine_ tohim, my Goethe, at fifteen, up through my hard years, when his essayson Self-Reliance, Character, Compensation, Love, and Friendship helpedme to understand myself and life, and God and Nature. "

Mr. Alcott is still with her, vigorous for his years. In 1879, at theage of eighty, he inaugurated the Concord School of Philosophy, "withthirty students. Father the dean. He has his dream realized at last, and is in glory, with plenty of talk to swim in. " The school was, forMiss Alcott, an expensive toy with which she was glad to be able toindulge her father. Personally she cared little for it. On one of herrare visits to it, she was asked her definition of a philosopher, andresponded instantly: "My definition is of a man up in a balloon, withhis family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earthand trying to haul him down. " For her father's sake, she rejoiced inthe success of the enterprise. Of the second season, she writes, "Thenew craze flourishes. The first year, Concord people stood aloof; nowthe school is pronounced a success, because it brings money to thetown. Father asked why we never went, and Anna showed him a long listof four hundred names of callers, and he said no more. "

In addition to the labors which the school laid upon Mr. Alcott, heprepared for the press a volume of sonnets, some of which areexcellent, especially one to Louisa:

 "Ne'er from thyself by Fame's loud trump beguiled, Sounding in this and the farther hemisphere, -- I press thee to my heart as Duty's faithful child. "

Mr. Alcott seemed to be renewing his youth but, in November, he wasprostrated by paralysis. "Forty sonnets last winter, " writes Louisa, "and fifty lectures at the school last summer, were too much for a manof eighty-three. " He recovered sufficiently to enjoy his friends andhis books and lingered six years, every want supplied by his devoteddaughter. 

With Miss Alcott the years go on at a slower pace, the writing ofbooks alternating with sleepless nights and attacks of vertigo. "Jo'sBoys" was written in 1884, fifty thousand copies being printed for thefirst edition. In 1886, her physician forbids her beginning anythingthat will need much thought. Life was closing in upon her, and she didnot wish to live if she could not be of use. In March, 1888, Mr. Alcott failed rapidly, and died on the sixth of the month. Miss Alcottvisited him and, in the excitement of leave-taking, neglected to wrapherself properly, took a fatal cold, and two days after, on the day ofhis burial, she followed him, in the fifty-sixth year of her age. Dr. C. A. Bartol, who had just buried her father, said tenderly at herfuneral: "The two were so wont to be together, God saw they could notwell live apart. "

If Miss Alcott, by the pressure of circumstances, had not been awriter of children's books, she might have been a poet, and would, from choice, have been a philanthropist and reformer. Having workedher own way with much difficulty, it was impossible that she shouldnot be interested in lightening the burdens which lay upon women, inthe race of life, and though never a prominent worker in the cause, she was a zealous believer in the right of women to the ballot. Sheattended the Woman's Congress in Syracuse, in 1875, "drove about anddrummed up women to my suffrage meeting" in Concord, she says, in1879, and writes in a letter of 1881, "I for one don't want to beranked among idiots, felons, and minors any longer, for I am none ofthem. "

To say that she might have been a poet does her scant justice. Shewrote two or three fine lyrics which would justify giving her a highplace among the verse-writers of her generation. "Thoreau's Flute, "printed in the _Atlantic_, has been called the most perfect of herpoems, with a possible exception of a tender tribute to her mother. Personally, I consider the lines in memory of her mother one of thefinest elegiac poems within my knowledge:

 "Mysterious death: who in a single hour Life's gold can so refine, And by thy art divine, Change mortal weakness to immortal power. "

There are twelve stanzas of equal strength and beauty. The closinglines of this fine eulogy we may apply to Miss Alcott, for both liveshave the same lesson:

 "Teaching us how to seek the highest goal, To earn the true success, -- To live, to love, to bless, -- And make death proud to take a royal soul. "